Flawless: Inside the Largest Diamond Heist in History (23 page)

The discovery of the garbage put the investigation on a fast track. Several inquiries were going on at once, and the diamond detectives’ offices became the round-the-clock command center for the investigation. Every detective on the squad was assigned to the case, and detectives from neighboring cities were temporarily reassigned to help.

The pressure to solve the crime was phenomenal. The heist had made news around the world. Estimates of the thieves’ haul ranged from more than
100 million to more than
400 million. It was difficult to quantify the losses, especially early on. One way was based on what was claimed as lost to insurance companies; another way, which produced a much higher number, was admittedly a guess based on the fact that not all of the victims were able to calculate their losses.

Many of the companies that were robbed had no idea what was in their safe deposit boxes that weekend. There was also the widely held belief that not all tenants reported the true value of their losses, afraid that claiming staggering amounts would reveal their participation in black market diamond trading.

The bare fact was that, even without knowing the true amount of what the School of Turin made off with, the documented losses alone meant that it was unparalleled in the annals of crime, in Belgium or anywhere else. Any way you counted, it was the largest heist in history.

The news was a crippling blow to the image Antwerp had been trying to project as a safe place to do business. As far as most diamantaires knew, the Diamond Center was as secure a building as any in the Diamond District. The thieves and the investigators knew differently, of course, but the average merchant found himself feeling very nervous in the days immediately after the heist.

“It was no good for the [city’s] reputation. It never is,” said Claes, of the Antwerp World Diamond Centre. “People weren’t particularly feeling secure anymore because the Diamond Center was known for having a good security system. Everything was in place there. Everything was in order there like in the other buildings. There were television cameras . . . Of course the room itself with all the safes, it was protected. So when you then see that none of it worked, then of course you don’t know who to trust anymore.”

Anxious to prove that Antwerp could protect her assets—or could at least bring the perpetrators to justice swiftly when that failed—the detectives worked under tremendous pressure. The clock was ticking: if any of the stolen goods were to be recovered, police needed to find them as soon as possible. Even hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of diamonds can be sold quickly, at which point the chance of recovering them falls to near zero.

The discovery of the trash put the detectives on the scent immediately and led them in many different directions. The Delhaize bag with the household garbage contained beer bottles, a wine bottle, empty plastic yogurt pots, and half of a partially eaten salami sandwich, all of which the police analyzed for DNA. They found two toll receipts in the garbage as well: one was for passage over the Brenner Pass from Italy on Sunday, February 9, 2003, and one for a toll highway through Innsbruck, Austria, on the same day. It was the first clue that their suspects were Italians.

The bag also contained receipts for items bought at a Brico hardware store in Mechelen on Valentine’s Day and at a local Delhaize supermarket the day before that. The items on the receipts matched what was found in the garbage as well as in the vault, including the crowbar, the Styrofoam, and the duster handle. Detectives were eventually dispatched to both stores, to see if anyone remembered who had made these purchases and, if they were lucky, to get CCTV video. They purchased all the items from both receipts so they could compare them with items found during their investigation.

Detectives also recovered thirty-five torn squares of paper stained by used coffee grounds from the Delhaize bag. “My colleagues started to puzzle that document together, not knowing whether it would be an invoice or somebody’s account,” said Peys. “You never know what you’re going to find.”

Many of these clues paid off quickly.

At the Brico store, for instance, detectives showed the receipt to the staff and a cashier remembered the purchase. It stuck in her mind, she said, because the men had paid with a 500-euro note, which was a rarity. Only one other customer that day had paid with a bill that large. The store hadn’t deposited the bills yet, and the police collected them to test for fingerprints. They found none.

The store didn’t have security cameras, but the employee described the men in detail. The detectives would later match those descriptions to D’Onorio and Finotto.

If there was any group of people who were as good as thieves at remembering the details of past heists, it was the police detectives who investigated them. As soon as the heist was discovered, they ran a catalog of comparable crimes from the past through their minds. One stood out as similar: the botched job at the KBC bank on Pelikaanstraat in 1997. During that attempt, men posing as bank clients had tried to access the vault area after hours but had set off an alarm in the process of trying to disable it. The thieves got away, and the police were able to identify one of them, but only long after he had fled the country. Detectives remembered that he had rented an office in the Diamond Center from which to organize the bank heist.

The man who’d been convicted in absentia in Belgium and arrested in Italy—but who’d never served time for the crime in Belgium—was Ferdinando Finotto of Turin. They dug out an old picture of Finotto from the case file and stuck it to a white dry-erase board in one of the conference rooms that became the detectives’ main theater of operations.

Finotto became the first person they suspected of being involved in the heist.

Others were soon to follow. Investigators piecing together the shredded document from the trash discovered it was a work order for video surveillance equipment to be installed at a business called Damoros Preziosi. They also found a ripped-up business card for Elio D’Onorio, a security expert whose business name matched that on the work order. Peys looked up Damoros Preziosi on the list of Diamond Center tenants and discovered that its owner—Leonardo Notarbartolo—had suffered no loss in the heist. His safe deposit box was among those that weren’t breached. “We saw that it was under the name of Notarbartolo, which at that moment didn’t mean anything,” Peys said. “But we knew that his safe hadn’t been opened.”

That in itself wasn’t suspicious, but if Notarbartolo’s box hadn’t been looted, then how did the work order get mixed up with the discarded items from the heist?

The diamond detectives obtained a search warrant for Notarbartolo’s office and returned to the Diamond Center on Wednesday, two days after the heist had been discovered. They were escorted to the fifth floor by Julie Boost, who was relieved to learn that the police had their sights set on someone other than an employee of the building. She and the three others who knew the code to the vault door had been grilled at the federal police building since Monday. That the police had found a copy of the building’s blueprints with a Post-it note with Notarbartolo’s name on it hadn’t helped divert suspicion away from the staff.

Boost opened office number 516 with her master key. Notarbartolo’s office was empty. Even the wastebaskets were barren. It was obvious to Peys that this was not an office used for legitimate business. They opened all the desk drawers and all the filing cabinets, finding nothing of value. Notarbartolo had done his job well, leaving not a clue as to his whereabouts.

The next stop was the vault, a surreal visit if only because the same LIPS door that the thieves had so smoothly bypassed still stood guarding the entryway. It worked perfectly fine, after all; replacing it would have been a foolish and time-consuming waste of money. After the police left the crime scene Monday night, the door had simply been relocked, this time with a spare key Marcel Grünberger kept in his private safe and with a new combination. It was a sure bet that the key stamp would no longer be kept in the storage room with the pipe. Likewise, the magnetic lock was perfectly functional and required only a new set of bolts to reattach it to the door and the door frame.

Inside the vault, the safes that had been cracked were in the process of receiving new doors. Paul De Vos finally had the opportunity to replace the old ones with the sturdier new ones with steel faceplates. In fact, it was De Vos who the detectives were there to meet. After dusting door number 149 for fingerprints, the detectives watched as he drilled through the lock and popped the door to Notarbartolo’s safe. Like the office had been, it was empty of anything worthwhile.

Upstairs in the security control room, the detectives checked Notarbartolo’s badge traffic and learned he was among the last people to leave the building Friday night before it was robbed. Back at headquarters, they watched countless hours of security videotape for their first glimpse of their latest suspect. They saw the handsome Italian go in and out of the vault every day the week before the heist and three times on Friday. In some frames, he carried a little purse under his arm that, when one was paying close attention, obviously was used to film through a hole in the side. The camera wasn’t visible, but the hole was. It was easy to miss such a detail if one wasn’t specifically studying Notarbartolo’s actions. Notarbartolo had apparently done some last-minute filming to satisfy the others that all systems were go.

The detectives had no doubt that he was the inside man. They were duly impressed with the patience he’d displayed in meticulously orchestrating the heist of the century over the course of more than two years.

Notarbartolo would have been proud to know that none of the staff members interviewed by the detectives remembered anything useful about him, much less an address for where he lived in Antwerp. He hadn’t listed a residence on his office lease.

Peys knew that because the thieves shopped at a grocery store just around the corner from the Diamond District, Notarbartolo’s apartment was likely nearby. He also knew that, because of the level of professionalism he’d come to expect from Notarbartolo and his team, it would be empty too. He was sure the thieves were in Italy, but they might as well have been on the moon. Although Italy was in the European Union, it would be very difficult to extradite any of its citizens for this crime, something that Peys was certain the thieves were well aware of. That didn’t mean he was about to give up, though; the next step was to contact the local authorities in Turin.

In Turin, Marco Martino’s phone rang.

Chapter Ten

BEEN CAUGHT STEALING

“If you want to steal, steal a little cleverly, in a nice way. Only if you steal so much as to become rich overnight, you will be caught.”

—Mobutu Sésé Seko, president of Zaire

While Belgian police ran their names, photos, and criminal histories through Interpol, the School of Turin congratulated themselves on pulling off the perfect caper, one that they were certain would leave investigators baffled for years.

After a long but uneventful escape through Europe, they gathered again on Monday, February 17, 2003, immediately upon their return to Italy. The meeting was not in Turin, but instead at a rendezvous point that they had agreed upon in advance. Investigators have never disclosed the exact location of the meeting point, but based on mobile phone records obtained later, they believe it was a villa in the Lake District northeast of Milan, near Lake Iseo, a slender finger of water surrounded by steep rocky hills and with a stunning Alpine backdrop.

Red-tiled villas and mansions sprinkled the lake’s shores, the rooftop landscape punctuated generously with brick church bell towers. The lake itself was dotted with islands that were home to Gothic castles and Baroque mansions accessible only by boat. In the summer, wealthy vacationers overran the place, with even a few Hollywood stars escaping to the seclusion of its craggy foothills; in the winter, it was virtually deserted. Instead of swarms of tourists, a handful of locals remained in town to live in the picturesque snow and ice of a summer town in the heart of winter.

It was a perfect remote location in which to divide their loot in luxury. They could certainly have afforded to rent the most expensive villa available, even without an off-season discount. It was here that the School of Turin had their first chance to truly relax and bask in the glory of a job that made them all richer than they could have imagined.

The men ate, drank, and relived the heist instant by instant while the money was sorted and the diamonds admired.

Notarbartolo now had enough to buy any model sports car he wished, and he could devote as much time as he liked to designing a private line of custom jewelry. He certainly had no shortage of material. But most important, his children—and his children’s children—could live in financial security for the rest of their lives.

All of the men had reason to celebrate. They toasted themselves for having gotten away with the heist of the century. None of them knew that Gust Van Camp had made a discovery that same morning that put them squarely in detectives’ sights.

They spent Monday night there and when they left Lake Iseo on Tuesday, Elio D’Onorio headed south toward his home in Latina, outside of Rome. Finotto and Tavano headed back to Turin. Notarbartolo headed toward Turin as well, but he didn’t follow the thieves’ protocol of destroying the cell phone and SIM card he had used to communicate with the others on the closed telephone network established for the heist. The hard part of the heist was finished, but, for Notarbartolo, the job wasn’t quite over yet.

His final task was to return to Antwerp to tie up loose ends.

Marco Martino was momentarily speechless. The head of Turin’s Mobile Squadron had already heard of the heist in Antwerp—it was all over the news—but he never imagined that the plot had originated in his backyard, and certainly not with Leonardo Notarbartolo at the center of it. In Martino’s mind, Notarbartolo was a small-time criminal, a pilot fish to Turin’s more storied crooks. Martino simply didn’t think it was in Notarbartolo to pull off a job of this caliber.

It was a sentiment that was later shared by reporters who covered crime in the city. Turin was overpopulated with flamboyant thieves. Lodovico Poletto, a reporter for the daily newspaper,
La Stampa
, didn’t even put Notarbartolo in the same league as the other criminals he covered.

Pancrazio Chiruzzi, for example, had earned the nickname “the Soloist with the Kalashnikov” for single-handedly holding up an armored car in 1988. Chiruzzi had a long history of bank robberies, stickups, and burglaries under his belt and was eventually sent to prison for twenty years on a murder charge. He was reported to have $25 million in assets, even though Poletto said he “never worked a day in his life,” meaning, of course, at a legitimate job. Though men like Chiruzzi made for more interesting newspaper articles, Poletto knew that Notarbartolo, who took great pains—albeit in vain—to keep his name unconnected to what would be his greatest criminal exploit, had aspirations that were no less grand than Chiruzzi’s. “He was a man with a dream,” Poletto said with a shrug years after the heist, going on to say that since Notarbartolo was identified so soon after the crime, the thief was still an amateur at heart.

Martino, though, was taking Notarbartolo very seriously.

The call had come to Martino on Thursday, February 20, 2003, from the Central Operations Service in Rome, similar to the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation. The agency had received a request from the Belgian federal police seeking assistance in gathering evidence to connect Notarbartolo to the heist, and, to do so, they needed help from Martino and his unit.

Martino’s Mobile Squadron occupied a series of offices on the first and third floors of an ancient stone police building on a broad, stately boulevard in central Turin. Whereas the Antwerp diamond detectives enjoyed modern facilities with glass-walled offices and modular cubicles, their Italian counterparts made do with drafty windows, wheezing radiators, and out-of-plumb doorways. The only adornments were what cops the world over decorated their walls with: totems and symbols that were important to them. For Peys and De Bruycker, those were the photographs of all the locations their team had conducted investigations around the world. For Martino, it was the religious icons of his faith, including a crucifix and two huge renditions of St. Michael, the patron saint of police officers, driving a spear into Satan writhing underfoot.

After the phone call alerting him to a Turin connection to the Antwerp diamond heist, Martino met with his detectives around their beat-up desks and aging PCs to devise a strategy for finally driving a spear into the School of Turin.

Barging into Notarbartolo’s house in Trana wasn’t as easy as one might think, regardless of the compelling evidence against him in Belgium. Searching for diamonds or anything else connected to the heist would require a judicial warrant issued by an Italian court, which could only be considered after the Belgian courts made a formal request—a process that would take time.

However, since Notarbartolo was a previous offender, Italian law allowed the Mobile Squadron to search Notarbartolo’s residence for two particular sorts of contraband without the need for a warrant: weapons or drugs. Martino’s officers hit the streets and, according to the official version of events, quickly located informants who told them that Notarbartolo kept illegal weapons in his house. In fact, the weapons search was nothing but a ruse.

On Friday, February 21, when the caravan of police cars wound through the mountainous subalpine roads toward Trana and arrived at Notarbartolo’s well-kept property, neither Notarbartolo nor his wife was home, but his adult sons Francesco and Marco were there. Francesco, the younger brother, was handsome and athletic, with the physique of a soccer player. Marco was his brother’s opposite, with more than a passing resemblance to actor John Belushi in his
Animal House
years. What they had in common, however, was a contempt for police veiled by an impassivity they had clearly inherited from their unflappable father.

The brothers opened the door without a fight, and soon investigators were scouring the bedrooms, the living room, the billiard room, and even Notarbartolo’s detached workshop. In the backyard, they attempted to search a two-thousand-gallon tank of heating oil, but they had no comparably sized container in which to transfer the oil, and emptying it onto the ground to see if there was a cache of diamonds inside would have been an unforgivable act of pollution if it yielded no evidence. They tried a different tactic to see if it was worth the effort: with Francesco and Marco Notarbartolo standing nearby, several officers put on a loud and exuberant show, pretending they’d found the mother lode. But the brothers didn’t so much as twitch at the bait.

Of course the officers found no weapons, but, when they ordered one of the sons to open the family safe, they found cash (euros, dollars, and British pounds amounting to about $97,000), jewelry, and seventeen diamonds. At the moment, the detectives had no idea if they were connected to the heist. Although some of the diamonds were in certification blister packs, that wasn’t necessarily suspicious; it was to be expected in the home of a jeweler with an office in Antwerp.

Since the Italian detectives didn’t have a list of goods stolen from the Diamond Center, the best they could do was catalog and photograph their discovery. Officially, they were there looking for weapons, not diamonds, and so had no authority to seize them. The packaged diamonds, including an unusual 70-point cognac, were carefully photographed so that their certificate numbers and accompanying information were clear. Pieces of jewelry were removed from the plastic Ziploc bags they were stored in and individually photographed.

All the goods went back into the safe, and Martino placed Marco Notarbartolo in charge of safeguarding all of the items. It was a binding order, effectively making him legally responsible for the safekeeping of the gems and jewels they’d inventoried and photographed. Such orders were usually reserved for property that was unreasonable for the police to take physical possession of, such as livestock, boats, and other such items. Although it seemed like a case of ordering the fox to protect the hens, there was nothing else they could do except threaten Marco Notarbartolo with the full severity of the law if he failed to comply. He accepted the edict stoically.

Empty-handed except for what was on their cameras, the police drove the forty-five minutes back to Turin to e-mail the photos to their colleagues in Antwerp.

While the Italian police were busy searching their home in Trana that Friday, Notarbartolo and Crudo were in the rented Peugeot driving over the Alps toward the one place where they were least expected to go: back to Antwerp. He’d had several days to bask in the afterglow of pulling off the greatest heist in history. As far as he was concerned, they’d executed it perfectly and left no trace of themselves behind.

It was important to return to Antwerp for several reasons. He had to return the rental car he’d driven after the heist to Italy. He also had to thoroughly clean the Charlottalei apartment, since they had left in a hurry and didn’t have the time to do a proper job of eliminating any trace of a connection to the heist. He also had to return to the Diamond Center so that he could badge in and out one final time; he knew the police would be watching the computerized traffic to see if any of the tenants failed to return to work after the heist.

It seemed like a suicide mission to return to the scene of the crime, but Notarbartolo was bloated with confidence, even after newspapers reported that the trash had been discovered in the thieves’ supposedly impossible-to-find dump location. He had no idea anything in the garbage could be connected to him—he didn’t know the household trash with D’Onorio’s work order had also been tossed into the forest—or that the police had already searched his office and his safe deposit box.

Notarbartolo knew from two long years of experience that the Diamond District would be practically deserted late Friday afternoon due to the Jewish Sabbath, so he planned to slip in and out of the Diamond Center just before closing time, when the fewest number of diamantaires would be around to see him.

He was so sure that he could charm his way in and out of the Diamond Center that he called his old friend Antonino Falleti, who lived in the Netherlands, and asked him to bring his family to Antwerp for dinner on his last weekend in town. He was done with Belgium, he told his friend; after this last trip, he would no longer have an apartment or a business office in Antwerp, so this was their last chance to see each other until their paths crossed again. He arranged for Falleti to meet him and Crudo at the Charlottalei apartment around 6:00 p.m. Notarbartolo and Crudo planned to leave Antwerp the next day, Saturday, on a Ryanair flight from Brussels to Milan he’d booked over the Internet.