Flawless: Inside the Largest Diamond Heist in History (15 page)

All of those sundry ideas fell to the wayside one day when Notarbartolo noticed that he wouldn’t have to look far and wide for the stamp at all because it was never removed from the pipe. The concierges kept the two pieces attached together in the lock box just yards away from the vault door. It was another eureka moment, a fabulous piece of luck that fell into line with his earlier observation that the staff had fallen woefully complacent.

Notarbartolo didn’t question why they would leave the entire key in a room directly next to the vault. Maybe they were astoundingly lazy, or maybe someone had lost the stamp in the past and they didn’t want to take the chance of its happening again. He was just happy to note that it was kept in a room with a flimsy plywood door and in a lockbox that would come apart with one twist of a crowbar. And so, an integral part of the door’s formidable defense had been overcome, through a combination of the concierges’ slack habits and Notarbartolo’s highly tuned powers of observation.

Of course the key was useless without the combination to the door. Learning that magic number would take some serious finesse.

Or another stroke of amazing luck.

While Notarbartolo worked on discovering the combination, Elio D’Onorio tackled the magnetic alarm. He stared at freeze-framed video images and diagrams Notarbartolo had drawn and admired the alarm’s simple ingenuity. It consisted of two identical rectangular pieces, each about four inches wide and twelve inches long. The first piece, the receiver, was bolted vertically to the jamb on the upper right side of the doorframe. The second piece was bolted to the door itself so that when the door was closed, the two pieces were aligned side by side. A keypad to the right of the door armed and disarmed all of the alarms inside the vault and the magnetic alarm on the door. When the magnetic alarm was armed, it sent a constant signal through wires, which were encased in a flexible steel pipe, to a round-the-clock security switchboard at Securilink. This confirmed that the magnets were connected and the moment they were separated and the magnetic field broken, Securilink would know.

Unlike the solid steel tubes that anchored the door to the doorway when it was closed and locked, the magnets didn’t physically prevent the door from opening. But they ensured that whoever opened the vault door when he wasn’t supposed to would go to prison. Securilink wasn’t even located in Antwerp, but it would take only a phone call on a dedicated line to the police to have the building surrounded in minutes.

D’Onorio didn’t bother wondering how to figure out the keypad code to turn off the alarm. Even if they obtained the code, the fact that the alarm had been turned off would have been evident to Securilink. Likewise, there was no point in figuring the quickest way to cut the wires. The vault door was never to be opened during off-hours, including the weekend. Any deviation from that rule would be immediately apparent to Securilink.

The magnets needed to stay together to keep the alarm quiet, but they needed to come apart if they were to open the door. D’Onorio stared at the video images and willed an idea to come to him. The magnets stared back at him, bolted firmly into place with a huge hex bolt in each of their four corners. He assumed they were locking bolts that would be impossible to unscrew, but even if they weren’t, what then? The only thing that worked in his favor was that the magnetic alarm was installed on the outside of the vault. Had it been inside, as would have been logical, it would have been impossible to tamper with once the door was closed. According to a security expert, the only explanation for this security lapse was financial—the magnets presumably were installed after construction on the vault was already completed; retrofitting them on the inside of the door would have been more costly than simply affixing them to the outside.

It took time, but slowly, an idea formed. The more he thought about it, the more it seemed plausible. He ran the idea past the other men, and they agreed there was a good chance it could work. The trouble was that it was labor intensive and it required a dangerous mission to Antwerp. Undeterred, D’Onorio made a list of supplies for his own infiltration of the Diamond Center. As the alarms expert, he would need to do this himself.

While D’Onorio dealt with the alarms, other members of the School of Turin carefully studied the images Notarbartolo provided of three important doors: the door accessing C Block from the parking garage, the door to the security control booth near the main entrance, and the door to the vault-level storage room that held the key to the LIPS door. They would all be locked, so they would need to make keys or at least reasonable facsimiles.

One thing the School of Turin knew well was that a few basic skills could open 80 to 90 percent of all the doors a person was likely to encounter, whether they had a key or not. Most locks are extremely simple, utilizing basic principles. If one knows these principles, lock picking can be extremely simple too.

The elegant method preferred by private eyes on television is to skillfully pick the lock using special tools that resemble something a dentist would use to probe for cavities. The difference between television and real life, however, is that in reality the work is tedious and delicate, utilizing a lock picker’s refined sense of touch.

A somewhat faster method is called “raking.” An L-shaped torque wrench is inserted into the bottom of a doorknob’s keyway and a small amount of constant pressure is applied on the plug. A special pick with a number of small “teeth,” or peaks, is inserted to the very back of the keyway, and the lock picker drags it quickly across the pins that bind the lock, like a pianist sweeping his fingers across the keys. The motion, combined with the torque on the plug, causes the pins to set one by one. It usually takes several sweeps of the rake to set all the pins. It’s less elegant than the first method, but no less effective. And it’s quicker.

The School of Turin had a great advantage in their quest to open the doors between themselves and the diamonds: The fact that one of their members ran a locksmith company meant they could order any lock they wanted to investigate without raising suspicions. Thanks to Notarbartolo’s reconnaissance, they knew that the inner doors of the Diamond Center were equipped with LIPS-brand locks, consistent with the make of the vault door and the safe deposit boxes. So they ordered a few locks and opened them up to see what they were dealing with.

The School of Turin used an Allen wrench to make a rake and made a special key specifically for the door that opened into C Block from the garage.

The locks that protected the safe deposit boxes themselves were an entirely different story. Normally, locks like these would be drilled open, but doing so risked setting off the vibration detector in the vault. Picking them was impossible unless the men also knew each door’s unique three-letter combination. They’d have to be forced open, but even that was going to be a challenge; they couldn’t be pried from the edges because the space between the doors and the housing was far too tight to insert even a credit card between them, much less the tip of a crowbar. For this job, they would have to invent and manufacture a specialized tool, one that couldn’t be bought at a hardware store because it didn’t exist. This tool would need to pull the doors directly outward with enough force to bend the half-inch-thick brass deadbolts that were sunk at least an inch into steel-cased holes.

Ordinarily, this would be a tall order. Only two inches of the deadbolt jutted out of the lock mechanism; the rest of it was contained inside the housing bolted to the back of the doors. Physics alone would indicate that it would be impossible for three or four men to generate enough force to bend a small knuckle of brass to an angle of nearly 90 degrees.

But Notarbartolo knew that the deadbolt didn’t need to be bent so steeply. Soon after he began casing the Diamond Center, he’d noticed a clue on his very own safe deposit box door as to how it might be forced open: the faceplate that kept the deadbolt in place within the lock was plastic. Once they started pulling, they theorized, the faceplate would crack and give way, exposing all eight inches of the deadbolt to the force they would be applying to it, not just the two inches on the end. That gave them a lot more to work with. They figured that, at most, the deadbolt would bend 45 degrees before the faceplate broke. Then the whole deadbolt would bow until it popped free of the slot in the doorjamb, opening the door.

The thieves sketched their special tool over and over while consulting Notarbartolo’s measurements of the safe door and crunched numbers into a calculator until they felt they had it right. Then they started calling around to check on the price of heavy aluminum stock and ran through their mental Rolodexes to see if they knew anyone who was a machinist.

By late 2002, the School of Turin had conducted nearly two years of research and espionage with Notarbartolo visiting Antwerp while the rest of its members worked from Italy. It was time for that to change. Research could only take them so far. To overcome the obstacles that remained, they needed to move their operation to Antwerp.

They held a status meeting to plan their next step. The room was filled with notepads, sketches, and maps, the material they needed to run through each part of the operation, to visualize every element of the break-in and make sure nothing was being overlooked.

They discussed the schedule in which the primary participants would relocate to Antwerp at least a week or two before the break-in. Their tasks during that period would include deciphering the garage door code, making a remote control to open the doors, ferreting D’Onorio into the Diamond Center so that he could have a closer look at the magnetic alarm, making adjustments to the safe deposit box pulling contraption they’d invented, and figuring out the combination to the LIPS door. On that last point, Notarbartolo had an idea, but it would require D’Onorio’s help.

They talked in detail about what they would find inside the safe deposit boxes and they strategized about what to take. Since they could carry only a limited amount of loot, they wanted to be certain they made off with the items most easily sold for the highest values. That meant focusing on diamonds in their certificate blister packs. Loose polished diamonds would be fine, too, along with large rough diamonds and any other gemstones they found. Smaller rocks would be left behind. Cash and anything that could be melted was fair game. They would leave anything truly unique or personalized because those items would be easier to trace.

By and large it was a good plan, but it still hinged on cracking the combination and thwarting the magnetic alarm. Once in Antwerp, they would know quickly whether their ideas would work or not. And if they would work, there was no reason not to execute the heist at the next opportunity.

In fact, there was every reason to move quickly. Although they’d gained invaluable information about the workings of the Diamond Center and its staff during their long planning process, two years was a long time to hope that nothing changed in the interim. For instance, one of the concierges might quit or be fired and be replaced by someone who insisted that the vault’s key stamp be removed from the pipe every day, as it was designed to be or make other changes to the security routine. Marcel Grünberger might order Julie Boost to beef up the building’s security measures, which meant the motion detector might be upgraded to an anti-masking model. The garage door opener might break, prompting the purchase of a new one whose code couldn’t be stolen out of the air by an electronic scanner. The possibilities were endless, and their concerns weren’t unfounded. In December 2002, the Diamond Center hired painters to freshen up the hallways, demonstrating that while the management might be lackadaisical about the building’s upkeep, they didn’t entirely ignore it. The School of Turin’s worst nightmare was that Notarbartolo would one day trudge up to the building and find workers installing a new computer-based video surveillance system.