Flawless: Inside the Largest Diamond Heist in History (2 page)

Chapter One

THE TROJAN HORSE

Money isn’t everything. There’s also diamonds.

—Proverb

Leonardo Notarbartolo set the world’s greatest diamond heist into motion on a cold gray autumn day in 2000 with a smile and a polite “merci beau-coup,” as building manager Julie Boost granted him free reign of the place he planned to rob.

As far as she knew, Boost had simply signed a new tenant and filled another vacancy in the tower of offices at the Diamond Center, the largest office building inside Antwerp’s storied Diamond Square Mile. The blue-eyed Italian was disarmingly charming. He said he was a diamond merchant interested in renting an office in the diamond capital of the world to supply his local retail stores in Turin, Italy, and his jewelry design business in Valenza. From what Boost could see, he’d be a perfectly adequate tenant.

In fact, Notarbartolo didn’t plan to buy a single stone in Antwerp; he hoped to steal as many as he could carry.

Notarbartolo was prepared for whatever interrogation the building’s manager might have prepared for him. He was armed with official-looking documents and glossy brochures describing his modest chain of jewelry stores in Turin. In his attaché case, he carried examples of his handcrafted jewelry manufactured in Valenza—shiny bracelets, necklaces, and diamond rings that he’d designed himself. He was prepared to explain that his business was going so well, particularly on the manufacturing side, that it made sense to open an office in Antwerp, where 80 percent of all diamonds bought and sold throughout the world changed hands. Anyone who was serious about trading in diamonds did business in Antwerp—and, by extension, so too did anyone who was serious about stealing them.

If Notarbartolo aroused any suspicions during Boost’s first meeting with him, he allayed them by employing the most effective tools at his disposal: charm and good looks. At forty-eight, Notarbartolo was handsome, although he carried a few extra pounds and his dark hair was thinning. With his open and expressive face, he could evoke in complete strangers a warm feeling of brotherhood and kinship the moment the tiny lines around his mouth crinkled into a captivating smile. He acted as if everyone around him was an old and treasured friend. He had perfected the ability to melt defenses and subvert suspicion. And just as important, he had the skill to make you forget him within minutes—he was engaging, but only exactly as engaging as he needed to be for the task at hand. He didn’t want to create a lasting impression; for his purposes, it was better to be quickly forgotten. This was precisely why he had been chosen for this part of the job.

After Boost and Notarbartolo concluded their introductions, they embarked on a tour of the facility. As they strolled through the halls, Boost pitched the office building as a smart choice for a merchant like Notarbartolo. At the equivalent of about $500 a month, the rent was competitive. Smack in the heart of the Diamond District, the building was conveniently located within steps of any business or service one might require, including three diamond quality–certification businesses, an array of cutters and polishers, supply stores that sold everything from loupes to grinding wheels, the country’s import/export agency, and, of course, the wholesalers themselves. Belgium recorded tens of billions of dollars of transactions for both rough and polished diamonds every year; in the course of just an average day, some 200,000 carats were traded, representing a value of about $200 million. Practically every decent-sized stone ever mined made its way at some point through the Diamond District’s three city streets. Many of those diamonds—hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth—circulated among the offices at the Diamond Center.

Boost was a prim and petite woman, her short blonde hair done in an almost retro-looking no-nonsense poodle cut. She toyed with the eyeglasses hanging around her neck on a long gold chain as she recited the building’s amenities. None of it was news to Notarbartolo; he already knew everything she was selling him on, and he didn’t care at all about such details as the affordable rent. While he was in fact an Italian jeweler, it was cover for his true vocation: Notarbartolo was a renowned thief in Italy embarking on the most daring scam of his colorful career. As the tour wound through the building’s hallways, he was far more interested in the building’s security measures than its proximity to the conveniences of the diamond industry. He’d already started compiling a mental list of the things he observed long before Boost pointed them out.

The most obvious antitheft measure was the building’s video surveillance system. There had been no attempt to conceal the cameras positioned in the hallways; quite the opposite, they were made as obvious as possible to relay the message to anyone walking around that they were being watched. Notarbartolo had already seen the security control room filled with monitors displaying images of tenants coming and going—he and Boost passed it in the main corridor as they began their tour—but he couldn’t tell with a passing glance what sort of system it was. Did the cameras record digital images on a computer hard drive or onto videotape? The difference was critical, and it was just one of the many things he planned on learning with his newly acquired inside access.

They took the elevator to the fifth floor, Boost jingling a set of keys in her hand. They turned onto a narrow hallway with doors on both sides; these were private offices. Since each tenant had his own preference of video surveillance, the walls were festooned with different models of cameras that craned overhead like huge insects, each aimed at a doorway. These weren’t so much antitheft measures as they were a means for the office occupant to see who was knocking at the door before deciding to let them in or not.

Boost unlocked door number 516, one of the few that didn’t have a camera, and motioned Notarbartolo inside. The office was quite plain, furnished with just a desk, a worktable, some cabinets, and a few chairs. Fluorescent light tubes flickered overhead, just like in the hallways, and the floor was covered with flat gray industrial carpeting. A bank of windows overlooked a gravel alleyway and some overgrown vacant lots behind the building. Tenants on the other side of the hallway enjoyed the better view of the Diamond District and Antwerp’s famous skyline, dominated by the gothic cathedral that lorded over the sixteenth-century market square. But Notarbartolo didn’t mind his subpar view. The office was just part of the ruse, a place to kill time between reconnaissance missions to the vault, the heart of the building where its tenants stored hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of diamonds, gold, cash, and jewels.

Finding the office more than satisfactory for his purpose, Notarbartolo was led back to the elevator, where Boost pushed the button for floor -2, two levels underground. When the doors slid open, Notarbartolo was struck by how bright the vault foyer was. Fluorescent bulbs lit the white walls and white tile floor, lending the space the appearance of an antiseptic operating room. A large white Siemens video camera was slung from the ceiling; the lighting in the foyer provided it with a television-studio-quality image of the small room.

They exited the elevator and turned left. At the end of the small room, a heavy vault door stood open into the foyer. Unlike in the movies, where vault doors are the color of handsome brushed chrome, this was painted a flat rust-colored maroon and it stood out under the stark lighting. A secondary steel-gated door barred entry to the safe room itself.

Boost rattled off the vault’s security features as they walked to the gate and peered through the bars into the safe room, but she wasn’t telling Notarbartolo anything he couldn’t see for himself with his specially attuned eyes. He saw that vault door was made by the Dutch company LIPS, and was among the sturdiest ever constructed. It was at least a foot thick and made of iron and steel.

The big vault door was open during business hours, Boost explained, but the day gate was always closed and locked. In order to get inside the vault, one had to buzz the control room on the main floor by using the intercom on the right side of the doorway. A guard would check the video monitor and, when he recognized the tenant, he would press a button that unlocked the gate. Boost demonstrated how it worked as she and Notarbartolo turned and stared into the shark’s eye of the video camera. There was a loud click from the gate. She pushed it open, and they stepped inside.

The low-ceilinged safe room was an almost perfect square about three times the size of the foyer, and just as brightly lit with rows of overhead fluorescent tubes. It looked deceptively empty, but Notarbartolo knew that the honeycomb of 189 brushed-steel safe deposit boxes covering the walls from floor to ceiling was filled with immense wealth. Each safe deposit box had a keyhole and three golden dials; tenants needed both a metal key and an alphabetic combination of their choosing to access their treasures.

Notarbartolo noted that the safe room was equipped with a combination motion detector/infrared sensor and a light detector, all of which were in plain sight. Even if thieves could get through the vault door, they wouldn’t be able to move, emit body heat, or turn on the lights—much less crack almost two hundred safes inside the room—without setting off alarms.

Every night at 7:00 p.m., the tenants’ treasures were sealed inside when one of the building’s two caretakers locked the LIPS door. The door stayed locked until 7:00 a.m. the following morning. On weekends, the vault remained closed from Friday night to Monday morning. There were no exceptions.

There were more than locks keeping this room safe. The vault door was armed with a magnetic alarm that, like the other sensors inside the room, was connected to an offsite security company. A magnet the size of a brick was bolted to the door itself. When the door was closed, it connected magnetically with another that was bolted to the doorjamb. Opening the door would separate the magnets and break the magnetic field, triggering the alarm; the security company would immediately notify the police that a break-in was in progress.

There were human defenses to be avoided as well. One of the two caretakers, known as concierges, was always on duty around the clock. Both lived in private apartments in the office towers. Their presence and their work schedules weren’t so much security measures—they also acted as twenty-four-hour-per-day assistants who opened garage doors for tenants needing to get into the building at odd hours. The diamond industry is international, after all, and there are times when a dealer has to do business with Hong Kong even when it’s the middle of the night in Europe. Even though little more than glorified after-hours doormen, the concierges nevertheless had important responsibilities: They were the ones who locked and unlocked the vault door every weekday. They both knew the combination; they both had access to the key.

And so, with a flourish of pen strokes, Notarbartolo infiltrated the Diamond Center. As the police would later say, he became officially “operational” the moment he signed his real name on a lease agreement and a safe deposit box rental form. He signed as the proprietor of Damoros Preziosi, a front company that would never conduct a single legitimate diamond transaction. He sealed the deal with a three-month cash advance payment for both. Boost handed Notarbartolo three keys: one to his new office, one to his safe deposit box, and a microchipped badge-card to get through the turnstiles at the front entrance.

The Diamond Center hadn’t required a reference check, a criminal background check, or proof that his company was registered with the Belgian government to export commercial goods. It was stunningly easy for Notarbartolo to insinuate himself where he didn’t belong using just his charm and a few brochures. Still, walking out the front door with the keys in his pocket, he was aware that he couldn’t yet let his guard down. Exiting the building didn’t end his security concerns; if anything, it heightened them.

While the Diamond Center’s 24/7 surveillance and antitheft measures were impressive, what made the building practically impenetrable was its location within the secure zone of the Antwerp Diamond District. This area, also known as the Diamond Square Mile, left nothing to chance when it came to securing its diamonds and the merchants who traded them. If a person had any doubts about the area’s level of security, they would likely be dissolved in one visit, as its security precautions were both extensive and obvious.

The district itself was composed of three short streets connected end-to-end at 90-degree angles creating the shape of a stiff
S
. The streets dated back centuries. They were old and narrow, a hard-angled ravine of steep concrete and glass office buildings. These three blocks were home to thousands of businesses that served the diamond industry in some way—banks, currency exchanges, supply stores, and four members-only bourses, which served as private diamond-trading cooperatives responsible for most of the diamond transactions that occurred throughout the world.

The Antwerp diamond industry’s headquarters, which at the time was called the Diamond High Council (the Hoge Raad voor Diamant, known as the HRD), was located here, as was the Belgian government’s diamond import/export agency. Brinks, the American armored car company, had a building here. The value of the diamonds in the pocket of a single person walking by was often enough to comfortably equip anyone for a life of luxury.