Flawless: Inside the Largest Diamond Heist in History (13 page)

Ironically, the safest place for the thieves would be on the vault level. With the magnetic alarm engaged on the vault door, there would be no reason at all for a tenant or the concierge to descend to the basement, no matter what the emergency. The concierges knew that opening the door at any time other than 7:00 a.m. on a weekday would send an alert to Securilink, the company that monitored the alarm, who would then call the police on the assumption that the concierge was being forced to open the vault. The tenant who left his passport in his safe deposit box prior to a weekend trip was simply out of luck; he’d have to wait until the start of the workweek before the vault would open again. For the School of Turin, it meant that there would be no traffic on the vault level from 7:00 p.m. every Friday to 7:00 a.m. the following Monday. They had a window of sixty hours.

The slow pace and tedium of planning a heist is something most Hollywood movies rarely depict. Heist films never show the frustration of needing to wait a month or more to get a critical piece of information from the inside man, such as confirmation on the number of security guards who work during the day. They don’t show the gnawing fear that something is being overlooked, or that their ideas might not work. And they don’t show the interminable hours staring at blueprints and watching videotapes over and over and drawing a blank.

If the men in the School of Turin watched such films, they likely would have gotten a laugh out of what they all seem to have in common: heists that are complicated to the point of absurdity and which leave far too much to chance.

To gain access to the underground vault of the Bellagio hotel in Las Vegas, the
Ocean’s Eleven
crew had to first steal a high-tech magnetic superconductor from a scientific installation to kill the power to the entire city. In the original version of
The Italian Job
(which, incidentally, took place in Turin), Michael Caine’s gang snuck into the city’s traffic control facility to take over the computer system that controlled the stoplights, then stole a load of gold once its delivery truck got mired in immobile traffic. The gang then escaped through an entirely implausible route in Mini Coopers. In
The Score
, Robert De Niro’s plan to steal a priceless French scepter from a safe in the basement of the Montreal Customs House relied on his accomplice—a man he didn’t know well or trust—hacking into the security network using a laptop. A lynchpin of the plan was De Niro’s ability to crack the safe in less than fifteen minutes.

Another hallmark of these fictional jobs is that they take only a few weeks to plan and pull off. By the time the School of Turin was ready to rob the Diamond Center, Notarbartolo would have spent twenty-seven months on his surveillance mission. And in the movies there is usually some sort of devious double-cross, pulled at the height of the crime, but which the hero invariably has the foresight to predict and thwart.

The School of Turin knew that real-life jobs were hard enough without the added drama of split-second timing, complicated disguises, and interpersonal subterfuge. And they knew that at the heart of every successful heist was a near-religious devotion to research.

Figuring out how to get into the Diamond Center was relatively easy compared to what they faced once they did. Once inside, they had to contend with a series of locked doors between them and the loot, most dauntingly the silent, immobile sentinel whose sole purpose was to keep men like them out of the safe room: the LIPS door. If they were able to open it without setting off any of the several alarms monitoring the vault, they’d have to figure out how to gain entry to the nearly two hundred locked safe deposit boxes that contained what they hoped to steal.

So far, no one had any idea how to do it without getting caught.

The vault door in the Diamond Center was an elegantly designed masterpiece of engineering. Its locks incorporated the most basic principles of physical safeguards as well as a number of ingenious countermeasures that were in place to prevent those safeguards from being subverted.

The schematics for the vault door and its inner workings are available from a number of sources, most notably from old locksmith manuals that legitimate safecrackers keep on hand in the same way auto mechanics keep repair books for old or rare engines. The School of Turin could also have ordered them from the manufacturer, which likely wouldn’t have hesitated to provide them to a legitimate locksmith outfit like Fontanella’s Personal Chiavi. But if obtaining the plans would be simple, figuring out a way to actually open the door would not.

From the plans, the thieves would have seen that the combination dial was connected to a long rod that operated a drive cam inside the door. The drive cam was connected to a stack of four round wheel plates, each with a notch in it. Each of the wheels corresponded with a number on the dial. As the correct numbers were dialed, the cam “picked up” a different wheel with the notches aligned and spun them in tandem. Once all four were lined up, it allowed a “fence,” or metal bar, to fall into the notches and out of the way of the key mechanism. Now the key could be inserted and turned to retract the bolts that anchored the door to the jamb. Without the right combination, the key could not be turned.

The key itself, which was assembled from the pipe and the removable stamp, operated a sturdy lock. The double-bitted stamp aligned with grooves and wards cut into a stack of sixteen steel plates. The lock was designed to be unpickable.

Without knowing the combination, a safecracker would have quite a time opening the door, even if he had the key. It could, nevertheless, be done. The first step would be to discover the combination. One way of doing that would be to drill a peephole into the door so that the safecracker could use a special eyepiece called a borescope to see the notches on the wheels. Doing so would require the safecracker to be intimately familiar with the door; he would need to drill the precise distance needed to view the wheels and no farther. If he were to accidentally drill into the wheels themselves, it could warp them and prevent them from turning properly. If he drilled the hole to the precise depth, then it would be just a matter of watching through the borescope while turning the dial back and forth until the notches lined up.

Drilling the hole, however, would not be nearly as easy as it sounds. The vault door was made of steel, and, depending on the model, backed by ultra-hard metal plates made of tungsten carbide or aluminum oxide around the combination mechanism. The LIPS company called them “torch and drill resistant layers,” or TDRs. Titanium- or diamond-tipped drill bits could eventually bore through these plates, but doing so would burn through several drills; the bits would outlast the motors. Drilling even a small hole would take days.

The School of Turin couldn’t afford to spend a day or more drilling through the vault door. In fact, they couldn’t spend any time at all drilling, as the vault was equipped with seismic alarms. These sophisticated detectors intended to sense vibrations in the physical fabric of a building or room are designed to recognize the unique repetitive vibrations of drilling, sawing, and hammering but can be programmed to ignore other frequencies like those produced by slamming doors or the passing rumble of a dump truck. But even if there hadn’t been any such sensors, drilling presented the danger of creating enough noise that a concierge could hear it if they were unlucky.

It was possible to learn the combination without drilling, but it would probably take just as long. The stereotypical image depicted in the movies of a safecracker using a stethoscope to hear tiny clicks and clacks is not far from reality. What he’s listening for are the telltale sounds of the fence making contact with the edges of the notches in the wheels as they rotate. Unlike in the movies, however, this isn’t done in minutes. The safecracker uses a graph to plot the “locations” of the clicks on the dial for each wheel, eventually coming up with the numbers that correspond with them. Then it’s a matter of trying every combination of those four numbers until the door opens. While it might be the most elegant way to crack a safe, it’s also the most difficult, with a high probability of failure.

Automatic safe dialers are available to do this job with the aid of computers—a robotic hand can be connected to the wheel to quickly dial through the combination possibilities—but they aren’t significantly quicker than a human safecracker spending days with his ear pressed to the door. In fact, the automatic dialing method can likely take days, if not weeks.

The last hurdle posed by the door was its magnetic alarm. The magnets—one bolted to the outside of the door, the other to the jamb—were the size of bricks. When the door was closed, they lined up side by side and created a magnetic field between them. A ten-digit keypad on the wall armed and disarmed the alarm (along with all the other sensors in the room), and the cables connecting the contraption to Securilink were housed in a flexible steel tube that snaked into the ceiling. The control mechanisms were tamperproof; if the alarms were turned off with the keypad, or if the cables were severed with a power saw, the security company would know it.

The thieves could bypass the magnetic alarm, in theory, if they used a plasma cutting torch or thermal lance to cut a man-sized hole in the door itself, leaving the alarm attached and intact. A plasma torch is like a gas welder, but far more powerful, capable of cutting steel like butter. But since they would have to cut entirely through the door, the shower of sparks that would arc into the safe room would set off the motion detector, the light detector, and the heat detector.

Blowing it up with C-4 was out of the question. The amount needed would probably threaten to collapse the building on top of them and even if it didn’t, every alarm in the Diamond District would go off.

The thieves needed a quick way through the door, one that wouldn’t take days to accomplish or require they bring with them a hardware store’s worth of tools and machinery. Months of brainstorming brought them many ideas, but these were all discarded as quickly as they’d come up, deemed unsuitable, implausible, or dangerous—or all three. The unavoidable truth was that there was no quick way through the door without the key and the combination. Finding a way to get both became Notarbartolo’s new primary mission.

Of all the people who worked at the Diamond Center, the person who knew the vault door the best was also the person most likely to be overlooked by the diamantaires hustling through its hallways.

Paul De Vos was in his mid-fifties, and, without his billiard-ball eyeglasses, he was all but blind. His fingernails were cracked and yellow, thick as seashells from years of working with tiny mechanical parts. He cut a frail figure shuffling through the streets of the Diamond District, but on days when it was warm enough for him to ride to work on the back of his gleaming Harley-Davidson Electra Glide, it was hard to remember that he was going to retire in a few years. It seemed incongruous for such a slight half-blind man to ride such a huge motorcycle, but the bike fit perfectly with his love for all things mechanical. In his view, the Electra Glide was the perfect machine.