Flawless: Inside the Largest Diamond Heist in History (12 page)

As resolved as De Beers was to hold onto each and every diamond discovered in Diamond Area 1, criminals were equally determined to steal them. One man swallowed 51 stones worth $2.5 million before X-rays revealed a small mountain of gumball-sized diamonds in his stomach. Some miners tied small leather bags filled with diamonds to the feet of homing pigeons to fly them out of the mining compound. It was a good plan, but one of the men spoiled it for the rest by being overzealous; he loading his bird with so many diamonds that it couldn’t fly over the fence. Guards found the poor creature flapping futilely on the ground, relieved it of the diamonds, and released it. Since the pigeon was trained to return to its coop, they followed it to its owner’s house, where he was arrested. Guards were subsequently ordered to shoot pigeons on sight.

Still other thieves filled the hollow shafts of crossbow bolts with diamonds. That anyone could smuggle a crossbow inside is itself a testament to the thieves’ ingenuity and determination. This method came to an abrupt end, however, when an errant bolt heavy with stolen diamonds punctured the tire of a jeep doing a security sweep of the perimeter.

While diamond mines provided temptation to thieves, Antwerp had much more than the occasional diamond to offer them.

It was obvious from the start that diamonds were only one form of wealth in abundance in the district. The Diamond Square Mile was also home to numerous jewelry designers and was, therefore, awash in gold, platinum, titanium, and silver. Some of the best names in fashion, including Cartier, TAG Heuer, Rolex, Tiffany, and Harry Winston, had a presence and employed private designers to fashion jewelry, watches, and accessories in which to embed diamonds. Businesses that specialized in precious stones other than diamonds—including rubies, emeralds, sapphires, tanzanite, tourmaline, opals, and onyx, among many others—were found throughout the streets surrounding the district. Given that many businesses had been handed down through the generations, Notarbartolo suspected that some safe boxes might contain ancient treasures that he could only guess at—priceless Roman coins, maybe, or royal jewels. And of course there was no shortage of cold hard cash circulating through the district’s offices and banks.

But it was diamonds, both rough and polished, that all but paved the streets in Antwerp. That was especially the case once every five weeks, after the most important diamond sales in the world, the De Beers Sights, which ranged in value anywhere from $500 million to $700 million. The vast majority of the stones came to Antwerp to be quickly resold by the Sightholders to the companies that cut and polished them into the precious gems displayed in retail stores around the world. And so, every five weeks, Antwerp swelled with diamonds like a mountain stream filled with spring runoff.

Rough diamonds may be interesting, but polished diamonds are spectacular. Because of their unique molecular composition and clear white color, diamonds can be cut and polished in a way that they refract light like no other gemstone, causing them to sparkle with all the colors of the spectrum. The more it sparkles, the more a diamond is said to have “brilliance.” And the greater a stone’s brilliance, the higher its value.

A dealer in rough stones needs to be able to imagine what polished diamond or diamonds lay within a given stone. Often a lesser cut is required in order to maximize the size of the polished diamond or to accommodate an irregularly shaped piece of rough. Cutters spend most of their time carefully analyzing diamonds with computers and with strong magnifying loupes to figure out where to cut. Internal flaws usually dictate this; if the diamond is fractured inside, it can explode if it’s cut in the wrong place, turning a once-precious piece of rough into worthless fragments. The location of a diamond’s first cut, called the “cleave cut,” is marked on its surface with a black marker.

Throughout the Diamond District and on the streets surrounding it, cutting factories specialize in this important but not so glamorous work. Long tables are filled with diamond saws reminiscent of machines from a Dr. Seuss book. Rough diamonds are clamped in a vise, and a circular saw blade dusted with diamond powder is lined up with the black mark on a diamond for the precious stone’s first cut.

Because diamonds are so hard, the process of making the first cut can take weeks. The saws run around the clock and they’re carefully watched. The cutters recognize when a diamond is almost cleaved by the sound a saw makes. When the saws start emitting a barely audible, high-pitched whine, the cutter knows to watch them carefully—because of the pressure of the vise, the diamonds can pop out and ricochet around the room once they’re cut.

From there, the diamonds are buffed in a special machine before being handed to the polishers. Each of these men spends his days hunched over a diamond-dusted grinding wheel, perfecting a diamond’s facets down to fractions of a millimeter, following instructions scrawled by the owner on the small paper the diamonds were delivered in. The machinery looks like what you’d expect to see in an auto garage, greasy and smudged from years of heavy use, but from it the polishers coax some of the most beautiful diamonds in the world. Because of all the grinding and polishing, the finished product can be up to half the carat weight than when it was a rough stone.

The diamantaires are consulted frequently along each of these manufacturing steps to ensure that their specifications are being met. It can take dozens of visits to the polishing houses to get a stone just right. Once they are perfect, diamonds are usually taken to a certification company in the Diamond Square Mile, laboratories that analyze a diamond and verify its four Cs: carat, color, clarity, and cut.

This process is the equivalent of having a car inspected before it’s driven off the lot. Once it’s verified as being a real diamond—an important first step since it’s not always easy to tell the difference between a diamond and a cubic zirconia, even for professionals—the stone is graded in each of the four categories. “Carat” refers to a diamond’s weight; “color” is a measurement of the yellow or brown hue all white diamonds have, the less the better in terms of value; “clarity” is a grade based on the number and size of a diamond’s internal flaws; and “cut” is an evaluation of its shape, symmetry, and finishing qualities.

Throughout most of the history of diamond trading in Antwerp, buyers and sellers agreed on the four Cs after much haggling in the bourses’ trading rooms or in the cafés on Pelikaanstraat. If you could convince a seller that his diamond was more of an F in color than a D—the scale goes from D, which is perfect white, to Z, which has a light yellow or brown tint—then you could probably knock a few thousand off the asking price.

The HRD (Diamond High Council) began offering uniform certificates in 1976 that were quickly adopted as the industry standard. When the certification is complete, the diamonds are individually sealed in numbered, plastic blister packs about the size of a typical business card. A certificate is issued that corresponds to the assigned number; it features a wealth of information about the diamond, including the four Cs. Diamonds with certificates are easier to sell as the buyer no longer requires a lifetime of expertise to judge a loose, polished diamond. With the certificate, he knows what he is getting, and this enables deals to be done over the Internet without the buyer even seeing the stone.

Although the certificates are numbered, the number can only be traced to the person who requested the certificate in the first place. Since diamonds change hands so frequently throughout the day, the numbers are almost always meaningless to someone hoping to prove a diamond’s ownership. In practically all situations, a buyer would never think to ask a seller to prove a diamond’s chain of custody; what’s important from the buyer’s point of view is the certificate, which allows him to accept a diamond’s merits at face value so they can quickly move on to the one thing that matters most, the price.

Still, if a thief prefers not to take the slim chance that the certificate might be traced, he can use the information on the package to order minor adjustments that will remove any trace of its former identity. If a certificate says a diamond weighs 1.02 carats, the thief could take the stone to a polisher and ask him to grind off one one-hundredth of a carat. Then, for only
75, the diamond can be certified again, this time as a 1.01-carat diamond.

It would be slightly less valuable than it was previously—perhaps by a few hundred dollars—but what was even more valuable to the thief was that, to the rest of the world, it would be a completely different stone, legitimized with its own unique certificate. A stolen diamond going through that process is gone for good, because there is then no way at all for a former owner to prove it was once his.

Detective Patrick Peys knew this as well as Leonardo Notarbartolo. This was why diamonds were rarely recovered after a heist. If the detectives were provided with a detailed list of what had been stolen, complete with certificate numbers, they would have to solve the crime and catch the thief before he had a chance to have the diamonds reworked or even removed from the blister packages. You couldn’t always count on the accomplices confessing to a rabbi.

Chapter Five

THE PLAN

“Obviously crime pays, or there’d be no crime.”

—G. Gordon Liddy

When Notarbartolo’s watch showed that it was just a few minutes before 7:00 p.m., he picked up his attaché case, locked his office door, and headed to the elevator. It was nearly the end of the business day at the Diamond Center, but Notarbartolo wasn’t quite done with his work. He pushed the elevator button for -2, and disembarked moments later in the echo-chamber foyer on the vault level. He paused for a moment at the locked day gate, waiting for the guard upstairs to buzz him into the safe room. Once inside, he walked directly to his safe deposit box and opened it. He took nothing out and put nothing in. His mission was simply to stand there pretending to be occupied with its contents until the concierge came to lock the vault door for the night. Notarbartolo wanted to see exactly how it was done.

An end-of-day trip to the vault such as this was one of a few theories detectives later would have on how Notarbartolo was able to learn about the nightly locking procedure. It was one of the least suspicious ways to gather information because it wouldn’t have been odd for the concierge to find someone still in the vault at closing time. Sometimes there was a last-minute scramble as diamantaires gathered the goods they’d been working with during the day to place them in their safe boxes before the big door was shut. But most of the men doing legitimate business quickly wrapped up what they were doing when Jorge or Jacques exited the elevator and announced it was time to leave. Not so for Notarbartolo; this was showtime for him. As with Boost, his goal was to get information without his mark knowing he was giving it. And so Notarbartolo did whatever he could to linger in the foyer as the lights in the vault were turned off and the day gate was pulled tight.

The giant vault door closed with a definitive boom, and the wheel operating its massive bolts was turned to anchor them in place. Using the keypad next to the door, the concierge armed the sensors protecting the room and then unlocked a plain door to the left of the vault. Inside were some paint cans as well as the stock of water bottles used to refill water coolers on the upper levels. This was clearly a storage room. Notarbartolo would have assumed the concierge stored the long key-pipe there while slipping the detachable stamp safely into his pocket, as basic security precautions dictated that the stamp and the stem be safeguarded separately. The concierge locked the storage room and turned off the foyer lights as he and Notarbartolo got in the elevator and took it up to the ground floor.

At 7:00 p.m., the staff on the main level prepared to seal the building for the night. Notarbartolo headed for the entrance in no particular hurry; information was rushing at him and he wanted time to capture as much of it as he could. In the control room, the guards were turning off video monitors. Notarbartolo was thrilled to see that, as they prepared the security system for the night, they swapped fresh cassette tapes for the full ones in the recording system; a VCR would be much easier to access than a computer’s hard drive.

Notarbartolo swiped through the turnstile. Though he was among the last who pushed through the plate glass doors, he lingered outside. He watched with studied nonchalance as, inside the entry foyer, a guard opened one of the glass doors and reached up to pull down a rolling garage-style door. It slammed to the ground with a rushing bang, followed by the distinct clacking of a lock being engaged. Notarbartolo assumed that the glass doors were also locked behind it.

He had watched this mundane ritual more than once so that he could be sure that what he saw was the standard operating procedure. While doing so, he was careful to spread out his observations so that no one would remember that he was often the last person in the vault.

When on occasion he stayed later than 7:00 p.m., which was allowed for tenants working in their offices without need to access the vault, Notarbartolo found that the main corridor on the ground floor was already dark by the time he left for the night. The control booth was unmanned and locked; the building’s video cameras were dutifully recording all the areas they covered, but no one was watching the images. To exit after hours, he used his badge to open a door near the elevators that led to a short corridor cluttered with garbage cans and bits of loose lumber. The corridor led to the parking garage. He noted that tenants were required to use doors that were badge controlled to come and go from the garage, but that there was also another door connecting the garage to C Block that was locked with a key. Entering or leaving through that door, if a key could be fabricated, wouldn’t leave an electronic trail, as would the doors that opened only with a badge.

Because the garage doors facing Lange Herentalsestraat were closed after hours, late-working tenants were supposed to call the concierge to open the door for them. Notarbartolo, however, found he could open the garage door without the help of the concierge: a key was left permanently inserted in the manual door opener on the wall. One twist to the right opened the door; one twist back to the left and the door closed. Notarbartolo found that to exit the garage unaided he needed only give himself enough clearance, then turn the key to the left and hustle through the opening as the door began to roll back down.

The intelligence gleaned from these late nights at the office might not have seemed like much to those who weren’t professional thieves. But in the hands of a master like Notarbartolo, these small tidbits were invaluable.

It’s been said that there are as many cafés in Turin as there are Catholics, and it isn’t hard to believe. Turin’s storied cafés have always been important meeting places for people with big ideas. Whether they were planning a revolution or debating the merits of Torino FC over Juventus, men have made their arguments in cafés, as the constant influx of traffic makes the perfect front for anonymity. Historically, these places have served as petri dishes for all sorts of sordid plots and plans, and they have also been good for recruitment. In fact, Count Camillo Benso di Cavour, who masterminded Italian unification after Napoleon Bonaparte exiled the Savoys, did so from the cafés around the palazzo that bears his family’s name.

The cafés throughout the Quadrilatero Romano in the old city are like miniature wedding cakes: no matter how small they are, every inch is well tended and tastefully decorated, chock full of coffees, teas, wines, liquors, chocolates, and pastries. One can usually find the owner himself polishing the brass filigree or waxing the marble countertop until it is as reflective as the surface of a lake. For customers, standing at the counter to sip their espresso is
de rigueur,
but also practical; if there are tables at all in the smaller cafés, there are usually no more than two or three, and those are almost always occupied.

Farther from the city’s center, café culture becomes no less important, but the cafés themselves take on more of a workaday nature. The farther you get from the historic churches and cobbled streets, the more likely you are to take your coffee in a rundown little storefront. That was the case with the café near Fontanella’s locksmith business and several of the cafés within paces of Notarbartolo’s jewelry stores. While investigators believe the big meetings took place at Notarbartolo’s house, the passing of smaller bits of information and intelligence undoubtedly happened over a thimbleful of espresso and a plate of cannoli amid the din of the lunch crowds. Had any of them been under surveillance, the police would have seen nothing criminal, or even odd, about two or three of them meeting for thirty minutes of drinking and conversation once every three or four weeks.

It may have been in one of these little cafés where Notarbartolo shared the good news with the others: Yes, there were active video cameras recording what happened everywhere they needed to go, but what had become obvious during Notarbartolo’s observations at closing time was that no one watched the monitors overnight. With no one watching them, the video cameras were as good as blind. The recordings were for watching later, only after a catastrophe struck. Videotapes were stored for a few weeks and not viewed unless something happened, which it hadn’t the entire time Notarbartolo was there. Removing evidence of their crime would be as easy as breaking into the control booth and stealing the tapes that recorded the break-in. Best yet, the guards clearly marked the videotapes with the month and day—rather than a code—so it would be simple to steal the correct ones.

Notarbartolo also told his colleagues the stunning ease with which someone inside the Diamond Center could open the door to the garage. Opening it from the outside would be trickier, but they had an idea of how it could be done. Based on Notarbartolo’s description of the garage door opener and the secret films he had made of what could be seen of the mechanism inside the garage, it was likely that the opener was as old as the building itself. If it was true, then that meant the garage doors operated on one of 1,024 radio frequencies that were preprogrammed into the circuitry on a series of twelve toggle switches. They could simply use an electronic scanner to run through all the possible frequencies to find the right one. It would take, at most, thirty minutes. Once they knew the frequency, they could make their own remote control using an RF transmitter and circuit boards they could buy at any hobby store or electronics retailer.

Although they were closer by half to the police kiosk than the main doors on Schupstraat, the garage doors were not in the officers’ line of sight. The Diamond Center had cameras monitoring the garage doors, but they broadcast their images inside the building, not to the police. He’d studied the street intensively for signs of other businesses’ cameras that might cover the garage doors, but he’d seen none. The offices facing C Block across Lange Herentalsestraat didn’t have external cameras that covered the Diamond Center’s garage entrance, with the exception of a nearby gold company.

If the sound of the garage doors opening and closing was overheard by the police inside the kiosk on Schupstraat, it wouldn’t arouse undue suspicion. It was not uncommon for the concierges to open the garage at night to let in those who needed to work after regular business hours.

Entering through the garage clearly beat the front door. The rolling gate covering the front door was locked from the inside. Even if they could have found a way through it, it was in full view of the police’s video cameras which, unlike the Diamond Center’s, were actually being watched live. Additionally, the front door was within sight of the police kiosk on Schupstraat, which was manned around the clock. And if that weren’t daunting enough, it would have been impossible to bring a getaway vehicle around to the front.

The first step of their infiltration began to take mental shape: Three or four darkly dressed men could blend into the shadows as they walked single-file toward the garage doors from Lange Herentalsestraat. Once they were a few paces away, they would trigger the door with their homemade remote and slip inside. It would take mere seconds for all of them to be safely inside and they would immediately click the remote again to roll the door shut. Once inside, they would have virtual run of the place.

The thieves’ daydreams of getting this far relied on a whole chain of what-ifs clicking as perfectly into place as the combination on the vault door. Their plan assumed they could learn the frequency of the garage door opener with an electronic scanner, which would require someone to loiter nearby for up to thirty minutes while fiddling with a suspicious-looking mechanism, and then trigger it a few times to be sure it worked properly. That was also assuming the building hadn’t upgraded to a more difficult-to-crack rolling-frequency transmitter, which automatically changed the code after every use. It assumed that the police wouldn’t be suspicious of the sight and sound of a garage door opening in the middle of the night. It assumed that a passerby wouldn’t happen upon them and question their activities. It counted on the concierge staying in his apartment, preferably sound asleep.

There were a score of unknown elements as well. As far as they could tell from Notarbartolo’s reconnaissance, there were no alarms on the door to C Block from the garage—the one that required a key that the School of Turin’s locksmiths would fabricate—or any motion detectors in the hallways. But there was always the chance that there was some alarm or sensor he’d overlooked.

And, although they felt it was a safe assumption that the concierge on duty would stay in his apartment, there was also the chance that he had some sort of after-hours ritual Notarbartolo didn’t know about. For all they knew, the men liked to roller skate through the empty hallways before turning in for the night. Even if the concierges didn’t roam the halls as part of their nightly routines, there was the possibility that they would be called to open the garage for a late-working tenant, introducing yet more people into the building’s corridors and stairwells. It was all a game of chance.