Flawless: Inside the Largest Diamond Heist in History (14 page)

De Vos hardly minded that he didn’t share in the glitz and glamour of the diamond industry. He was simply pleased to work in a field that he loved—not diamonds, but locks. De Vos worked for Hillaert BVBA, an independent locksmith company founded in 1921 that most diamond businesses knew to call when they needed work done on their vaults, or the locks changed on an office door. No one knew the workings of a lock like De Vos.

De Vos lived in a small cottage home he had built himself near the town of Heist-op-den-Berg, about a forty-minute drive from Antwerp. Although it looked like it was made of gingerbread, he could rest assured that no one would break into this house in his absence. The windows were barred, their frames made of reinforced steel. The locks on every portal were top of the line. Most impressive was the front door, certainly the only one of its kind among the small cluster of forest homes nearby, and perhaps even in all of Europe.

It was a twelve-inch thick Ribeauville vault door with a custom glass panel on the inside showing its clockwork gears and locking pistons. The door opened with a deadbolt connected to a combination dial and four twists of a long forged metal key. It was as strong and impenetrable as could be found in any Diamond District bourse or bank. If the house burned to the ground, the door would remain standing. Primarily a novelty, this custom-built door was homage to De Vos’s life’s work with locks and sprockets and keys and flywheels.

While the house was tidy, the attached workshop was a rat’s nest of tools, spare parts, and gizmos. Four or five thousand-pound safes anchored the workshop to the ground; some were functional, others eviscerated. A
Playboy
calendar hung on a wall behind an array of different sized crowbars. Piled in the corners were boxes full of locks and parts from around the world; return addresses were from Tann, Sargent & Greenleaf, and Fichet.

De Vos literally knew the LIPS door in the Diamond Center inside and out. He had installed it when the building was first constructed, along with the rows of safe deposit boxes that it protected. Over the years since, he had been called many times to change its combination. That required opening a panel in the back of the door, loosening its innards, and averting his eyes while Grünberger or Boost set the new four-number combination. With the numbers from zero to ninety-nine for a hundred possibilities on each turn, that equaled 100-million possibilities.

De Vos did similar work on the safe deposit boxes. Although the boxes came in various sizes—Diamond Center tenants could rent boxes that ranged in size from three-inch tall letterbox safes to ones that were nearly two feet tall and could fit a small suitcase—the doors were all designed the same. The hinges were on the right and located inside the safe itself so they couldn’t be dismantled from the outside when the door was closed. The brass deadbolt, two inches tall and a half-inch thick, locked into a slot an inch deep on the left side of the safe box opening. When the doors were shut and locked, their edges were flush with the housing, machined to within millimeters of the opening they covered so that not even the blade of a pocketknife could be jimmied between the door and the jamb.

Tenants may not have given the locks’ mechanism much thought so long as they did what they were supposed to, but, like a soldier with his rifle, De Vos could take them apart and put them back together again with his eyes closed. Their mechanics were produced in modern factories, but their principles were at least forty centuries old. As locks go, they were simple, but highly effective.

Everyone who rented a safe deposit box was given a short silver key with an oval bow, or handle, which was etched with the LIPS logo and the box number. The key was inserted in a horizontal slot in a round steel plug on the left side of the safe deposit box door. The grooves cut into the stamp corresponded with metal wards, or barriers, in the keyway. When the correct key was inserted, all of the grooves lined up opposite the wards so that the key could be rotated clockwise inside the lock, engaging levers that moved the deadbolt horizontally to disengage it from the slot in the doorway. Importantly for Notarbartolo and his gang, only the key and the internal levers moved; the horizontal slot into which the key was inserted did not.

But nothing would move—no matter how much force was applied—if the right combination of letters wasn’t first dialed on the gold wheels lined up to the right of the keyhole. Each dial controlled another lever mechanism that locked the deadbolt into place through a tongue-and-groove system. The lever disengaged the tongue only when the dial was in the right position. With twenty-six positions on each, the three dials added up to 17,576 possible combinations. The deadbolt, the levers, and all the metal innards of the mechanism were attached to the inside of the door and covered with a faceplate.

One of De Vos’s jobs at the Diamond Center was to set new combinations for safe deposit box owners, as he had done upon Notarbartolo’s arrival. When tenants moved out of the Diamond Center, they were required to either leave their boxes open or provide the combination so that De Vos could access the lock mechanism on the inside of the little doors. He would remove the faceplate with a screwdriver and then loosen a catch on the dials so that, from the other side, the new owner could choose a three-character code. When the new combination was set, De Vos would tighten the catches and replace the faceplate.

The operation took only a few minutes and was much easier than another of his responsibilities, which was opening the safes when tenants forgot their combination. That was far more arduous and required a few hours. The only way to open the safes without the combination was to drill through the door. The process ruined the door, and he would then have to replace it with a new one.

In the decades since he had first installed the bank of safes, he had replaced about a dozen or so of their doors, although he knew all of them needed to be replaced. The original design had a flaw: the inner faceplate covering the brass deadbolt and the guts of the lock was made of thin gray plastic, a weak point. In the years since the Diamond Center had been constructed, LIPS had upgraded its design to include steel faceplates, making the lock mechanism bolted inside the doors much sturdier overall.

But upgrading all the doors would have been a disruptive, time-consuming, and expensive endeavor. De Vos’s suggestion to replace them, repeated to both Grünberger and Boost at various times during his tenure, was ignored.

Chapter Six

SAFEGUARDS

Always keep in mind why you are picking any particular lock, and realize that there is often a better way to bypass it, which may ignore the lock completely.

—
The Visual Guide to Lockpicking

Whichever of the men figured out that Styrofoam and hair spray knocked out the motion detector surely earned himself a few rounds of drinks. Investigators don’t know if it was Finotto, who had been faced with motion detectors many times during his illustrious career, Elio D’Onorio, an electronics and alarm system expert who was also a thief of some renown in Italy, or one of the other, never identified accomplices.

Whereas Finotto provided the muscle and Notarbartolo the charm, D’Onorio provided the brains. D’Onorio officially resided in Latina, a small town an hour south of Rome, but law officers called him “the Roman” just the same. He had been arrested and jailed in 1992 for his involvement in a string of robberies, including a heist of five kilos of drugs and weapons from an Italian courthouse, the theft of a billion lire from the Monte dei Paschi di Siena bank, and the robbery of the postal service of 5.8 billion lire. Altogether these netted him and his accomplices 8 billion in Italian lire, the equivalent of $6.15 million. Back out on the streets in 1996, D’Onorio wasted no time getting back in action.

Like the other members of the School of Turin, D’Onorio owned front companies that presented a veneer of respectability. He owned both a real estate company and an alarm business. An expert in computers and electronics, he had a way of thinking around problems that emphasized the simple approach.

The police don’t know when or how D’Onorio first met the other members of the School of Turin or when he joined their crew—in fact, when Marco Martino learned of his involvement, he was surprised the gang went outside of Turin to recruit an accomplice.

It’s plausible that they were stumped by how to get around the LIPS door and put out word at one of the smoky cafés on the fringes of the city that they needed an alarm expert. It’s just as likely that he was an acquaintance of one of the men. Whatever the circumstances, D’Onorio’s reputation preceded him when he joined in the plan to rob the Diamond Center. Given his skills and the hurdles they faced, it was a natural partnership. Like the others, D’Onorio had a flair for exploiting obvious loopholes.

A fine example of this skill was the way they figured out how to get around the motion detector. It was genius in its simplicity, a hallmark of the School of Turin’s operations.

The motion detector in the safe room was actually two in one, equipped with both passive infrared technology (called PIR) and microwave Doppler radar. This dual-technology unit was small, a white box about the size of a large computer mouse with an opaque curved lens dominating half of it, but it was more than enough to cover the whole safe room from its location to the left of the entryway.

The PIR detector worked by noting sudden changes in the amount of infrared heat energy in the room. Because temperature can change frequently in a space, such as when the lights are turned on and off, it was calibrated to notice changes in the frequency range emitted by the human body. This is common among household motion detectors as well, which ignore minor heat changes so they don’t sound an alarm every time the family pet walks in front of them. Theoretically, it’s possible to trick this kind of motion detector by moving extremely slowly into and through a room, slowly enough that the change in temperature is gradual and minute. But that was hardly plausible for the School of Turin’s purposes.

The second sensor, the Doppler radar, emitted microwaves and “mapped” the room based on the pattern that resulted from their being reflected off the walls and furniture. If something or someone moved through the room, the reflection pattern would be disrupted.

Either of these measures was daunting, but, critically, the device was set with a fail-safe meant to minimize false alarms: both the infrared sensor and the microwave sensor had to register changes at the same time before the alarm would be triggered. A book falling off a shelf wouldn’t provoke the alarm because it wouldn’t change the amount of infrared in the room. Likewise, turning on the light would spike the temperature, but it wouldn’t set off the alarm because the microwave pattern wouldn’t be disrupted. Someone entering the room, however, would both create motion and emit body heat, thereby triggering the alarm.

Police believe it’s almost certain that the School of Turin bought a motion detector, or several of them, for practice. Based on Notarbartolo’s photographs and description of the one in the Diamond Center’s safe room, they could have easily purchased a similar model, if not the exact one, in most hardware stores or ordered online from security companies. They would disassemble the motion detector in order to understand exactly how it worked and then work toward defeating it.

Since walking in super slow motion was impractical, the preferred solution was to cover the sensor with something. Infrared rays are easy to detect, but they also are easy to block. In fact, infrared rays can’t even penetrate glass. If Notarbartolo could knock out the PIR sensor in the daytime, when the device was turned off, the thieves could place a shield in front of it during the break-in and disable it for good.

The demonstration of how this could work was probably done with everyone involved in the heist present. Even if not everyone was going into the vault on the night of the heist, the practice session would be an educational opportunity for them all.

First, the detector would have been turned off, as it was during the day at the Diamond Center. Then, someone produced a product intended to obscure the lens. It would take just a few sprays from an aerosol can of hair spray to create a sticky opaque film over the lens of the motion detector. They could also have used Vaseline smeared across the lens in a thick coating, but applying it would have been trickier than with a spray can since the person doing it would have to use both hands. Once the film was applied, it would be all but impossible to notice with just a casual glance that the infrared lenses were now masked. Even if the film across the detector didn’t completely prevent it from picking up infrared rays, it would have at least greatly reduced the distance at which it could detect changes.

Most modern motion detectors use a technology that renders this sort of trick obsolete. Detectors are programmed to sense when they’ve been masked based on a specific pattern of responses from both the infrared and microwave signals. In fact, Belgian law requires that any motion detectors installed as of 2002 in the Diamond District be anti-masking. However, as with much else at the Diamond Center, such as the VCR-reliant surveillance system, the motion detector was never upgraded as new technology became available.

With the heat sensors masked, the next step in the demonstration would have been to disable the microwave sensor. For this, they used a large Styrofoam panel three inches thick and attached to an extra-long broom handle. It looked like the world’s largest and ugliest sponge mop, but, with a rectangular recess cutout on one side meant to fit perfectly over the unit on the wall, it would completely cover the motion detector. The material would also help block some body heat while it was being maneuvered into place, just in case the masking film didn’t work as well as expected.

Their next challenge was the second alarm in the vault—the light detector. Based on Notarbartolo’s surreptitiously recorded videotape, they knew it was attached to the ceiling roughly in the center of the room. According to the blueprints, that placed it about twelve to fourteen feet from the motion detector. The light sensor itself was a small rectangular box about the size of a tube of lipstick. A tiny lens exposed a photoresistor, a high-resistance semiconductor connected to a simple circuit board. When light waves of a certain frequency came into contact with the semiconductor, they caused a small atomic reaction—the loosening of electrons—that created an electrical current; the current triggered the alarm. This was the same technology used in cameras to automatically prompt the flash in low-light conditions.

Since the concierge turned off the lights in the vault each weeknight, the thieves would have to remember to turn out the lights in the foyer before opening the LIPS door, if they figured out how to open the door at all. Any light spilling into the vault from the foyer would set off the alarm; therefore, they needed a way to subvert the sensor.

They devised a way to defeat the light sensor that was as simple as the methods that took out the motion detector. They needed only to cover its lens with black rubber electrical tape. The ceiling was low enough that a man Finotto’s size could reach up and touch it.

Once they knew how to disable the alarms, the big question at hand was which to disarm first, the motion detector or the light sensor. If the motion detector were masked in advance with a film spray, as was the plan, it was likely that the PIR sensor would be sufficiently blinded that it wouldn’t notice someone like Finotto creeping inside to tape over the light detector twelve feet away.

When the tape was in place, they could use low-energy LED headlamps or red-lens flashlights to see as they moved the Styrofoam into its final place over the motion detector. Then they could turn on the lights and move freely, the expensive technology rendered impotent by about
20 worth of material from a hardware store.

Returning to Antwerp, Notarbartolo dutifully paid the rent on his office and his apartment three months in advance each quarter. As the months stretched on, the warm and sunny summer of 2001 turned again to winter. Ragged clouds were pulled off the Scheldt River by piercing winds and dragged through the streets of the city, bringing with them maddeningly alternating periods of snow and rain, then cold sunshine. And then, before long, it was springtime, then summer again.

If the change of seasons leading to summer 2002 seemed fast to Notarbartolo as he watched from his apartment’s seventh-floor window, the plot itself moved forward slowly. Whenever it seemed they’d ground to a halt, when they began to think that maybe the Diamond Center’s vault was indeed impenetrable, another part of the puzzle fell into place and kick-started their enthusiasm all over again.

One such moment came when Notarbartolo discovered that gaining access to the long key that opened the LIPS door would probably be the easiest part of the entire operation. As a clever security measure—and because it was about a foot long—the key was fashioned so that it could be broken down into two pieces: the stamp on the end that operated the locking mechanism and the long pipe that comprised the body of the key. Notarbartolo had known for some time that the concierges kept the pipe in a small lock box on the far wall of the storage room which was just to the left of the vault’s heavy door. He must have assumed that they put the stamp in their pocket during the day and that it was locked with them in their apartments overnight.

He’d run through dozens of scenarios for getting hold of the stamp. They could infiltrate the building on the night of the heist, break into one of the apartments while the concierge was sleeping, and remove it by force, but they had ruled out the use of violence from the plan’s inception. They could also break into the concierge’s apartment during the day when he was occupied or out of the building, but they wouldn’t be able to do so without being spotted by a video camera. If the concierge carried the stamp with him, they could pick his pocket, make a cast of the key stamp in a clay block, and slip it back, but it would be risky.

With other locks, a thief could have inserted a soft metal key blank and twisted it back and forth with enough force that the metal wards would mark the blade. Those marks would show the locksmiths where to cut the key so that it would work in the lock. That, however, was impossible with the LIPS door since it was left wide open during the day, and to get to the keyhole, Notarbartolo would have to at least partially close the door, which would immediately make him look suspicious to the man watching the video camera in the control booth. Even if he were able to escape notice, such an effort would be useless anyway; the lock was deep inside the heart of the door and the steel plates were too wide to leave an impression on a blank.