Flawless: Inside the Largest Diamond Heist in History (27 page)

The next day—Saturday—the prisoners received a quick schooling in the arcane features of the Belgian judicial system. They were driven separately to the justice building—an imposing old brick and stone facility—for questioning by someone known as a Preliminary Investigations Judge, or an examining magistrate, who was part of the prosecutor’s office.

Falleti later described the subterranean holding cell at the justice building as resembling something from feudal times, lacking only a hay mattress and shackles on the wall to perfect the image. There wasn’t even a toilet. He spent four hours alone there before being led through a maze of narrow corridors to the magistrate’s office where, in addition to the judge, there were a stenographer and two police officers.

Falleti sat and waited in silence, the only sound the ruffling of papers as the magistrate read the police reports of his initial interrogation. When he was questioned at last, it was along the same lines as before: Why was he in Antwerp? Why was he trying to throw away evidence? What did he know about the heist?

The other suspects were put through the same paces. Asked again why she had tried to empty out the apartment the night before, Crudo elaborated on her earlier statement, admitting that she had seen a small sparkling stone on the carpet. She said she was afraid that if the police searched the apartment, they might use the stone as a reason to implicate Notarbartolo in the heist, and so she had asked Zwiep to help her gather items to be removed from the apartment. When it was his turn before the magistrate, Notarbartolo said nothing.

The magistrate did not consider the explanations offered by Crudo or the other suspects to be credible. He ordered them all detained for an additional five days. Just as before, they were kept apart from one another to prevent them from sharing details of their interrogations or colluding on an alibi.

They were separately transported to the Prison of Antwerp, which looked like it had been designed by Edgar Allan Poe. Just like the Belgian justice system, the detention center was a holdover from Napoleonic times. As viewed from the street, it was a grimy brick and concrete edifice about three stories tall with arched parapets, flying buttresses, and tall narrow windows covered in iron bars. A tall brick wall around the building took up an entire city block. The prison complex consisted of several narrow interconnected cell blocks that enclosed separate outdoor areas where hundreds of prisoners awaited their days in court.

It was a notorious facility known for stark living conditions that not even the guards could endure. As such, the guards often went on strike to protest their working conditions. The prisoners had their own upheavals in order to bring attention to the facility’s dangerous level of overcrowding. The summer before the heist, the Prison of Antwerp had been the scene of hunger strikes and other inmate actions to protest their living conditions.

For Notarbartolo, the booking process must have been especially humbling. Only twenty-four hours before, he could have had the best that Antwerp had to offer, with his near limitless proceeds from the robbery. He could have stayed at the finest hotel, drunk the best champagne, and shopped at the most exclusive clothing boutiques. Now, though, like any other new arrival, he was stripped, deloused, and hosed off before he was thoroughly searched. He was given prison-issue sneakers, plain blue pants, and a blue sweater with a wide white stripe. Tea or industrial drip coffee—a foreign concept to Italians—was the best libation available. His accommodation measured thirteen feet by six and was bare except for a bed and a bucket to be used as a toilet.

During the initial five days of their incarceration, the four suspects weren’t allowed to speak with each other or to engage in any outside communication, except to try contacting lawyers. They were confined in their cells with no TV or radio and no access to the exercise yard. Notarbartolo did catch Falleti’s eye across the room during their initial processing, but they didn’t speak. Notarbartolo simply offered his old friend an apologetic shrug.

During his isolation, Notarbartolo puzzled over what the investigators might have against him. Throughout the interrogation, Peys had been careful not to tip his hand, though it was apparent that the detectives were convinced of Notarbartolo’s involvement. The questions were pointed and showed that, while Notarbartolo had been in Italy reveling in a job well done, they’d been busy snooping into every corner of his life in Antwerp. Notarbartolo knew that even with all of the planning, he and his compatriots had made a grave mistake at some point. He just had no idea what it was.

The ultimate irony of Notarbartolo’s situation was that the man who had stolen between
100 and
400 million worth of diamonds and cash had to appeal to the Office of Legal Assistance for a lawyer since he couldn’t pay with his pilfered loot without confessing to the crime. The attorney assigned to the case in turn referred him to an experienced defense attorney, Walter Damen. Notarbartolo also contacted his Italian lawyer, Basilio Foti.

Falleti had more trouble finding legal representation. He knew no one in Belgium except Notarbartolo and a sister who lived in Brussels. He only knew that he was in big trouble and he was scared. When he was sixteen, his father had been jailed for extortion and served six years in an Italian prison, missing a large chunk of Falleti’s life. He wanted to avoid anything like that happening to his own children, so Falleti had always lived a law-abiding existence with an honest job. He knew he was innocent, but being innocent wasn’t enough; he needed a good lawyer.

Desperate, he stuck his head out his cell window and yelled to the prisoners lazing about on the exercise yard, pleading for someone to recommend an attorney. Amazingly, one of them responded. A prisoner sauntered over casually, so as not to alert the guards, and gave him the name and telephone number of an attorney named Jan De Man. Falleti scrawled down the information and banged on his cell door, asking the guard to contact the attorney for him. This unconventional shot in the dark worked: Falleti met the chain-smoking, dapper De Man three days later, and De Man in turn arranged to have one of his associates, Eric Boon, represent Zwiep.

Falleti tried yelling the names of his friends through his cell window to see if anyone could hear him, and Crudo eventually yelled back. She didn’t yet have a lawyer, she yelled to Falleti in their crude form of communication, and so Falleti arranged for De Man to find a lawyer for Crudo as well.

When they appeared before the magistrate again on February 24, all of them had representation, but that didn’t result in their freedom. They were ordered to be held for an additional two weeks while the detectives and prosecutors continued to collect evidence and build their cases.

Leen Nuyts, a spokesperson for the Antwerp Office of the Prosecutor, told reporters that the four defendants were “being held on suspicion of being co-authors in the theft.”

While the prisoners cooled their heels, police detectives crisscrossed Europe gathering evidence.

In Italy, it looked like the military had invaded Trana. Local uniformed police, detectives from the Turin Mobile Squadron, three of the Belgian diamond detectives, and platoons of forensic investigators overwhelmed the hillside village when Martino and his men went to collect the evidence from the Notarbartolo family safe and to thoroughly search the property for other clues.

The Belgian authorities had found proof positive of their primary suspect’s involvement in the Antwerp heist from the pictures the Italian police had taken of the safe’s contents. Of the seventeen diamonds found during the first search of Notarbartolo’s home in Trana, nine were in blister packs from diamond grading labs. Of these, one was a sure match to a stolen stone: a brilliant-cut, deep brown (known as “cognac”) diamond weighing 0.70476 carats. This stone was fatal to Notarbartolo’s pleas of innocence, as its certificate number was found on the list of goods reported stolen. It was only one stone, but it was damning evidence of Notarbartolo’s involvement.

When the authorities arrived to assume possession of the stone, the Notarbartolo sons were home—but the jewelry, cash, and diamonds Marco Notarbartolo had been ordered to keep were not. Marco Notarbartolo told Martino that two men, whom he hadn’t recognized, had come to the door one night and said they had instructions from Notarbartolo to remove some items from the family safe. They took everything and vanished in minutes. Marco Notarbartolo said he didn’t know where they had come from or where they went.

The detectives exploded at the discovery that the irrefutable proof of Notarbartolo’s guilt was gone, but the brothers did little more than shrug at the investigators’ bad luck. It would have been difficult for most people to remain composed in the face of the screaming red-faced tirade that ensued—first at the house and later in Turin at the police station while the men were relentlessly grilled—but Francesco and Marco Notarbartolo had spent their whole lives learning from their father’s example how to deal with cops. They were like disciplined soldiers who’d fallen into enemy hands, resigned to the consequences.

Police practically disassembled the house, looking everywhere from the flower gardens to the attic rafters for signs of a hidden cache. They found nothing.

Elsewhere, police were conducting a massive roundup of known School of Turin members in an effort to find out who else had been involved in the heist. Aware of the gang’s modus operandi, they knew there had to be more actors in this plot than the people they’d identified.

From the wiretap inside Aniello Fontanella’s Personal Chiavi locksmith shop—set up as part of a broader sting against the School of Turin codenamed “Magic Moment”—Italian detectives heard Fontanella and alarms expert Giovanni Spurgo discussing the diamond heist and then mentioning the failed 1997 bank job in Antwerp that Finotto had been convicted for. Police immediately arrested both Fontanella—“the Wizard with the Keys”—and Spurgo. Both men denied their involvement in the Antwerp heist and volunteered to give DNA samples to prove their innocence. In fact, the fifty-three-year-old Spurgo had the perfect alibi: he had been in jail during the heist weekend, nabbed on suspicion of pulling a job at a Turinese jewelry store.