Flawless: Inside the Largest Diamond Heist in History (25 page)

This was a delicate moment. De Bot and Vanderkelen were ten minutes away, even if they sped there with lights and sirens wailing. The Diamond District was filled with cops, but the last thing the diamond detectives wanted was for the district police, who would be there first, to arrest Notarbartolo.

“We needed guys [on the scene] who knew the importance of Notarbartolo, but who also knew that it was as important to know where he stayed,” Peys said. “Arresting somebody, throwing him to the ground, and then saying ‘Okay, you’re the suspect, we have every evidence and now we want to know where you live,’ that’s where it stops.”

The diamond detectives needed Notarbartolo to think he was nothing more than an important witness and to volunteer his address as part of a routine interview. If they could get to him before he slipped away, it was possible that any associates of his who might have been watching could retreat to frantically clean out his apartment and scour it of vital clues. Since Kamiel had noticed that another man had accompanied Notarbartolo, this was a real possibility in the minds of the detectives. The ticking clock they faced was the possibility that someone connected to Notarbartolo would notice his detention and then quickly react by destroying potential evidence. The detectives would not learn where Notarbartolo’s apartment was in time if the district police stormed into the Diamond Center and slapped handcuffs on him. Once Notarbartolo was placed under arrest, the detectives anticipated that, as a professional criminal, he wouldn’t tell them anything.

De Bot called the district police, described what was going on at the Diamond Center, and gave strict instructions to keep Notarbartolo at the Diamond Center but not arrest him or say anything about his being a suspect.

As De Bot peeled out of the parking lot, Vanderkelen sat in the passenger seat frantically calling the other detectives. While they had planned on joining everyone at the bar and had only been in the office to finish their interview with Grünberger, the other detectives would now join them instead. Across town, the eight investigators drinking with De Bruycker put their beers aside and rushed to the Diamond District. Peys did a U-turn and called his wife to tell her he would be going back to the office again.

Meanwhile, at the Diamond Center, Notarbartolo was growing increasingly impatient with Boost’s inane chatter. It was very out of character for the manager to be so gabby. Peys later complimented her performance. “I’m not always in the best way of dealing with Julie Boost,” he said, “but she did an excellent job by stalling him.”

Outside the building, several police officers slowly gravitated toward the Diamond Center, and a few went inside. The appearance of the police in the main lobby was more than Notarbartolo could bear and he began edging his way toward the front door and freedom.

Boost, on the other hand, was relieved that law enforcement had finally arrived, but she couldn’t understand why Notarbartolo wasn’t being taken into custody. The scene fell apart into one of sheer confusion—Notarbartolo tried to talk his way toward the exit, Boost argued in hushed tones with one of the officers to arrest him immediately, and the officers grappled with what, exactly, they should do to contain the situation until the detectives arrived. One thing they were not willing to do was to arrest someone just because Julie Boost told them to.

Fortunately, they didn’t have to wait long. De Bot later commented that it felt like he made the ten-minute trip from headquarters in “ten seconds.” They’d turned off the emergency lights and sirens as they maneuvered through the vehicle barricade on Schupstraat and parked in front of the Diamond Center. Though their hearts were racing, they strolled inside trying to appear friendly and casual. It wasn’t hard to pull off. Vanderkelen looked like a wholesome college athlete and De Bot could have been his balding father.

As disarming as they may have been, Notarbartolo knew he was in for a dangerous game of cat and mouse as they took him to the side in the hallway to speak with him. “Notarbartolo, because he’s quite intelligent, knew something was going on,” Peys explained, “but he couldn’t afford to act suspicious. If he’d said ‘No, I’m not going to say anything,’ he would have burned his last bridge.”

The questioning was easy at first, but the detectives soon got to the point: And where do you live in Antwerp? Suddenly, Notarbartolo’s French wasn’t so good and, as politely as ever, he explained that he didn’t understand. “Mr. Notarbartolo said that he speaks only Italian, that he doesn’t understand English or French,” De Bot recalled. But it was such a bald-faced lie—Notarbartolo had been speaking French perfectly well when they arrived—that the detectives patiently but firmly repeated the question. Notarbartolo now did the stalling, his mind racing for a way out of the jam in which he found himself.

Unaware of the tense drama unfolding on the main floor, Fay Vidal finished her work at IDH Diamonds on the third floor and took the elevator to the -1 parking level. As she tried to exit, she found the garage doors shuttered. The guard steadfastly refused to let her, or anyone else, leave the building. Orders of the police, he said.

For Vidal, it was the last straw of a long and exhausting week. From Rijfstraat to Schupstraat, there had been only one topic of conversation: the heist. Like many other victims, she’d filed her insurance claim, and there was nothing more to do now except try to get back to a normal routine. At the end of this very long week, she was eager to get home and try to put it all behind her. Now this.

But Vidal wasn’t easily told what to do. “That’s not one of my characteristics,” she later explained. At that moment, she resolved to herself, “I’m going to leave this building.”

She marched down the main corridor toward the Schupstraat entrance, intent only on finding Julie Boost and demanding that she be allowed to leave through the garage. Like most tenants of the Diamond Center, she had no clue who Leonardo Notarbartolo was and, in fact, had never even heard his name. It was clear that the man she passed in the hallway was being questioned in relation to the heist, but so had many people in the previous five days. She had no idea that he was the one who had stolen her precious jewels, diamonds, and family heirlooms.

“I see a man standing there with a little jacket on, and there are three other men, very tall, and they’re looking at his papers, and they’re obviously talking to him,” she recalled. “I hear him say, because he’s Italian, ‘
Questo non è possibile
’ [‘This isn’t possible’]. Here’s this man who doesn’t understand what they want of him and why they want his papers and [he’s like] a little virgin, ‘What do you want?’”

At the time, Notarbartolo was “absolutely nobody” to her, but when she found out later that she could have reached out and punched the man who robbed her, his name was forever pronounced as if she were spitting gristle from her mouth.
No-tar-BAR-tolo
.

Shortly before the police arrived, Tonino Falleti realized he had to go to the bathroom.

It was freezing outside, and Notarbartolo, stuck in conversation with Boost, was taking a lot longer than the few minutes he’d promised. Falleti paced under the Diamond Center’s concrete awning and eyed the empty street for a convenient place to use the facilities, but there was none. Schupstraat was filled with diamond businesses and banks, all of which were either closed this late on a Friday or required security badges to enter.

His need finally became too much to bear, and he walked around the corner to a nearby tavern. Rather than return to the Diamond Center right away, he decided to drink a beer and wait for his friend from the warmth of a barstool. Falleti became slightly concerned when he tried calling Notarbartolo on his cell phone to tell him where he was and while the phone was answered, whoever answered didn’t say anything. So he decided to walk past the Diamond Center again in the hope of running into Notarbartolo on the street. What he saw when he turned the corner baffled and alarmed him.

Schupstraat was filled with police outside the Diamond Center, with more arriving every minute. There seemed to be a lot of excitement and confusion on the street. Falleti had a sinking feeling that Notarbartolo was in some sort of trouble and that it had to do with the heist. He called Crudo and asked her what he should do; she told him to return to the apartment immediately.

As calmly as possible, Falleti walked away from the mob of police toward his car and managed to find his way back to Charlottalei without getting lost. During the drive back, he tried calling Notarbartolo but this time there was no answer at all. He was extremely worried about Notarbartolo and the depressing little apartment did nothing to help. He drank a shot of grappa to help clear his head. It was getting on in the evening and the dinner he and Zwiep had brought from the Netherlands was still untouched. Crudo was tense and filled with dread, unsure what to do.

Crudo was worried that Notarbartolo was in trouble because of his extensive criminal history. She and Falleti agreed to drive back to the Diamond Center so that she could speak to the police about where he was and what was happening to him, but then they changed their minds in the car. It wasn’t like Notarbartolo not to answer his phone; they took his silence as a signal that he was in trouble.

Falleti decided he’d rather not leave his wife and kids at the apartment and risk them getting caught up in a police investigation, so he and Crudo returned to the apartment, where they gathered Falleti’s family for the drive back to their home in the Netherlands. They packed up the items in the apartment in a hurry. There was the sense that they were trying to flee ahead of some calamity. The uneaten food was repacked, the girls bundled back into their overcoats, and the suitcases arranged by the front door. Falleti helped Crudo organize everything she and Notarbartolo had planned to dispose of at their leisure later that weekend. Falleti would return to Antwerp the following day after he’d had some time to think of a plan.

Less than a half a mile away, Notarbartolo understood the pressure Crudo felt. He knew that the moment he told the detectives his apartment address, it would be overrun by police, so he stalled for as long as he could, giving his wife and friends time to clean up and clear out. He was aware he was playing a losing game; it was only a matter of time before the polite insistence of the questioning collapsed into pointed suspicion that he was being intentionally unhelpful.

Of course, for the detectives there was never any question that Notarbartolo was a suspect, but he didn’t know that. He had no clue of the evidence the police had against him and he still hoped to be able to talk his way out of this by playing the confused, innocent victim. The detectives knew Notarbartolo was hiding something, but, by keeping their inquiries as friendly as possible, they gave him no reason to become indignant and uncooperative. “He was very confused,” De Bot recalled. “He was very surprised. You saw that on his face and nonverbal behavior. I don’t think he knew that we were looking for him.”

Notarbartolo’s only hope was to eat up enough time to give Crudo and the others time to abandon the apartment and hopefully leave nothing behind. And he had to be polite enough about it that it would be impossible later for the detectives to claim he’d hindered their investigation, which could have been another excuse to arrest him. Plus, as long as they continued talking in a friendly way, the police might let slip what they had on him.

Under questioning, he claimed he didn’t know his apartment’s address. He told De Bot he only knew how to walk there from the Diamond District. De Bot, as pleasant as ever, steered Notarbartolo toward his police car and said they’d be happy to drive the route back to his apartment. The Italian thief was like a determined chess player desperately moving his lonesome king from one square to the next while his opponent’s rooks and knights patiently worked him into checkmate.

Eventually, Notarbartolo ran out of squares, and from the back seat of the squad car, he directed De Bot to the apartment.

“He was very afraid to say where his apartment was,” De Bot recalled, “but when we say to him, ‘Sir, when you are not involved in the criminal case, why are you afraid to say where you live, of where you stay?’ he understood that when he doesn’t cooperate on that matter, that it was difficult for us to believe him . . . So he understood that he must give an address or otherwise he had problems with the authorities.”