Flawless: Inside the Largest Diamond Heist in History (22 page)

When August “Gust” Van Camp woke up Monday morning, he couldn’t remember whether or not he’d locked the heavy green metal gate on the service road leading into the Floordambos forest the day before. If he had forgotten, it was out of character. Well into his sixties and retired from a career as a grocer, Van Camp was meticulous about the care of this picturesque stand of woods on the outskirts of Brussels. He patrolled them nearly every day as a member of the conservation organization Jacht en Natuurbeheer, or Hunting and Nature.

It was Van Camp’s self-imposed duty to keep trespassers off the land, a wildlife and nature preserve, and it was a never-ending job. He treated the responsibility as if he were guarding a nuclear missile site; if he wasn’t at home or helping a friend tend his nearby pumpkin patch, he could be found walking the paths of the green forest or the cornfield that abutted its edge, shotgun on his shoulder and his trusty English Springer Spaniel bounding along beside him.

Van Camp was perpetually on the lookout for dirt bikers who tore along the area’s wooded paths on loud motorbikes, and for other trespassers who treated the forest like a garbage dump. It never failed that Van Camp discovered beer bottles and cigarette butts deep in the glades, the telltale signs of some late-night teen party. People even dumped household appliances and old furniture in the underbrush. Once, he discovered a pile of dozens of old tires that had been tossed in the middle of the rutted dirt road separating the field from the trees. Years before, he’d even found a dead body in a wooded ditch, a victim of foul play.

Van Camp hated that fact that so few people seemed to share his devotion to preserving the natural beauty of the woods. Over the years, his mission to protect the Floordambos from litterbugs began to look less like a job to enjoy in retirement and more like an obsession. Anyone encountering Van Camp on his regular foot patrols wouldn’t think of him as the friendly neighborhood woodsman but as the tyrannical guardian of the forest who was best not encountered twice. He’d gotten so frustrated at the endless stream of litter that he took to calling the police on a regular basis. His name and his gruff voice became well known at the local police station. In fact, they considered him something of a nuisance. In most cases, his calls went unheeded and there was nothing for him to do but gripe to his dog and clean it up himself.

Although it rarely helped, Van Camp always locked the gate on the dirt road that led from the cornfield into the forest. Waking up that Monday morning, he was troubled by the thought that he might have forgotten to do so the day before. He dressed in his standard outfit (a camouflage T-shirt under his overcoat, a faded green baseball cap, and grubby blue work pants tucked into thick rubber boots that came halfway to his knees), kissed his wife good-bye, and grabbed his keys. As always, he brought along his shotgun in case he spotted a rabbit or a pheasant.

Van Camp drove his dusty white Volkswagen van the few miles from his tidy home on a suburban street in Vilvoorde, a village just a few miles from Brussels and its international airport, to the forest. Originally part of an eighteenth-century estate, the Floordambos was divided into two by the E19 highway that connected Brussels to Antwerp. The local government had placed seventeen acres of it under protection in 1991. Van Camp owned some of the land he patrolled, but acted as if he owned the whole forest.

Van Camp turned on to a wooded road where a tongue of dirt emerged between the trees on the right and led into the cornfield. He trundled the van down the pitted track until he reached the end of the field at the steep berm leading up to the highway. Where the path curved left into the dense trees, the dark green gate stood wide open. Annoyed he’d forgotten, Van Camp parked, grabbed his shotgun, and decided to take a stroll into the forest before coming back to lock the gate.

Approaching a fork in the road, Van Camp started to turn left, away from the sound of speeding traffic on the highway, when he stopped in his tracks, his attention caught by something in the path straight ahead. He muttered a string of colorful Flemish curses, his pleasant morning walk ruined by the sight of empty champagne bottles in the middle of the wide path. As he walked closer, he saw that the bottles were only the tip of the iceberg.

In the underbrush to the right of the path was what looked like a Dumpster’s worth of large gray garbage bags, some spilled open. They hadn’t been there as recently as late afternoon the day before, when he’d last patrolled the area. They were littered over an area ten to twenty feet from the path and scattered around the bases of small trees. If it hadn’t been for the champagne bottles lying in the open, he might have walked past the mess without noticing; despite the lack of leaves on the bare trees in February, the branches of the undergrowth formed a screen that was hard to see through from the path. Van Camp propped his rifle against a tree and began rooting through the trash bags, determined to find something—a discarded piece of mail, perhaps—that would identify whoever was too lazy to find a proper rubbish bin. He fully intended to file another police report.

Within one of the bags, Van Camp found a smaller white trash bag from a Delhaize grocery store that was filled with kitchen waste, including used coffee grounds, a half-eaten sandwich, and some torn-up pieces of paper. He pulled out the shreds of paper and examined them closely, noting that he could make out part of an Antwerp address. He pawed deeper into the larger bag and found brown paper envelopes and other documents from the Diamond District, including what seemed to him to be certificates or invoices for individual diamonds. He knew for certain there was something odd about the trash when he discovered one of the bags contained Indian rupees.

At the same time that Van Camp was fuming in the forest over yet another brazen example of disrespect to his precious forest, his wife Annie was at home watching the news. The story dominating the broadcast wasn’t that Venus Williams had won the singles match in the Proximus Games and come one step closer to winning the diamond-encrusted tennis racquet. Instead, the lead story was about a spectacular burglary that had occurred over the weekend in Antwerp’s Diamond Square Mile. A vault in one of the big diamond office buildings had been looted and the thieves had gotten away with untold millions of dollars’ worth of diamonds. Though no one had yet calculated the amount of the loss, reporters were already calling it “the heist of the century.”

The Van Camps would disagree for years over which of them connected the dots to realize that the garbage strewn in the Floordambos was from the great heist in Antwerp. According to Gust Van Camp, he realized right away that the refuse was connected to a diamond robbery, although he had yet to hear the news that the Diamond Center had been looted. His wife, however, tells a slightly different story. According to her version, Van Camp returned from the forest livid at the desecration, intending to call the police to report yet another incidence of littering. When he described some of the odd contents of the garbage bags, it was she who made the connection to the Diamond Center heist.

It was indisputable, however, that Gust Van Camp had discovered a treasure trove of valuable clues. He called the local police, and they, in turn, called the investigators in Antwerp. The local officers cordoned off the area and awaited the arrival of the federal detectives, who wasted no time speeding south along the E19 highway. Before it was even noon on Monday, the forest was crawling with investigators, who photographed the scene, gathered the trash, and walked for miles through the underbrush looking for additional evidence. For the police, it was an astonishing break early in the case; the heist had been discovered only a few hours before.

The trash had been discarded in a flat area between the path and the steep slope leading up to the highway that was about thirty yards wide. From the forest floor, it was another twenty yards or so up to the shoulder of the road. It was too far for the thieves to have heaved the garbage over the guardrail. The trees between the highway and the location of the trash would have made that impossible anyway. Investigators surmised that the thieves had driven past the forest on the highway, taken the exit to Vilvoorde, and circled back until they found the dirt access road leading into the cornfield. The champagne bottles suggested they had spent some time toasting the discovery of what they thought was the perfect place to lose the trash forever.

Indeed, it would have been perfect if anyone but Van Camp had been in charge of keeping an eye on things. As they drove out of Antwerp, the thieves would have been anxious to get rid of the garbage as soon as they were a reasonable distance away from the city. They didn’t want to risk driving with it for too long. Large teeming bags of refuse filling the trunk and the back seat would be hard to explain to a highway cop should they be pulled over for a traffic violation. Cruising down the open highway, it was easy for them to think they’d have their choice of dump locations before getting to Brussels. There was no shortage of places they could have gotten rid of the evidence—including gas stations, rest areas, and the refuse bins outside of restaurants near the highway—but they probably didn’t want to take the chance of being caught dumping so many bags. Business owners in Belgium were serious about preventing the unauthorized use of their garbage cans. Many were locked and some were even monitored by security cameras. That was especially true of businesses along the highways.

“On every highway you have gasoline stations. Everywhere there are signs that it is forbidden to throw [away] personal belongings,” Peys explained. “It’s forbidden. There are cameras in those petrol stations. I can imagine if I had that garbage, I wouldn’t throw it away in an official garbage bin that is standing next to the public way as you never know who is going to collect it.”

By the time the thieves could see airplanes leaving from the Brussels airport, the little stand of trees seemed like their last opportunity. After dumping the trash, they did nothing to destroy its evidentiary value, such as burning it. Doing so would have risked drawing unwanted attention. Smoke rising from a fire in a forest so close to the highway would have been hard for authorities to ignore. While not burning the trash can be seen as a huge mistake in retrospect, at the time it made perfect sense just to leave it where it seemed well hidden. The thieves drove out of the Floordambos confident that their stash of garbage would never be found.

But thanks to Van Camp, the hiding place lasted only half a day. It was the first time the School of Turin’s luck went against it, and detectives were well aware that it was only by pure chance that the garbage was discovered so soon after the heist.

“We’re talking about a highway that has miles of forest and green next to it,” Peys said. “I’m talking about thirty or forty kilometers [from Antwerp]. Now, on thirty-eight of those kilometers, nobody would ever bother about trash, and after months it would be taken by public services and thrown away . . . For one reason or another, it’s written in the stars, they threw the garbage right on that spot, where that guy is coming every day and annoying himself every day about rubbish that’s thrown away by people.”

The champagne bottles, the unopened bags, the emptied shells of Sony videocassette tapes from the CCTV system, and the material Van Camp had handled were carefully packaged up and transported back to Antwerp. Police technicians made plaster casts of tire treads found in the softer soil. Officers searching the underbrush found long ribbons of videotape strung through the foliage a few dozen yards from the trash dump that presumably belonged to the dismantled videocassettes they’d already found.

The videotape was carefully gathered up, and one of the investigators organized a search party to scour the shoulders of the highway for miles in both directions to see if they could find additional clues. It seemed to pay off: searchers found numerous strands of videotape all along the road, as if someone had held one end of the tape and tossed the spool out the window so that it would unwind in the hope that it would degrade from exposure to the elements. Police thought that these bits of tape could also be from the dismantled CCTV videocassettes. Eventually, all of the recovered tape was sent to the Belgian headquarters of Sony for expert reconstruction.

The heart of the investigation moved to the diamond detectives’ offices at the federal police building and to the Antwerp Forensics Laboratory, a plain building just across the street. Peys and the others who’d been in the vault returned after sundown with their load of evidence at the same time that detectives who’d gone to the Floordambos returned with the garbage bags. The bags were opened and their contents carefully sorted and logged.

“It was the day after that colleagues tried to reconstruct what was in those garbage bags,” Peys said. “It came surely from the heist, but finding clues toward the suspects is something different. It wasn’t obvious, I assure you.”

The bags contained rubber gloves, rolls of tape, wrenches, pliers, spools of wire, alligator clips, and several metal components that confounded the police at first. It would take weeks before a police technician was able to put it together properly, and surmise that this was the device used for pulling open the safe deposit boxes. Investigators also found both parts of the vault door key and several other fabricated keys that were used to pick locks inside the Diamond Center. There were discarded documents, envelopes, and diamond papers, one of which was uncrumpled to reveal tiny emerald pointers.