Flawless: Inside the Largest Diamond Heist in History (31 page)

While this seemingly farcical argument played out on the appellate level, Notarbartolo was reminded yet again that the Belgians’ stated commitment to speedy trials for accused criminals meant little in real life. He’d been behind bars for nearly as long as he’d rented his office at the Diamond Center; only a jail like the Prison of Antwerp could make him long for the dingy little apartment on Charlottalei.

Since the so-called Man of Gold had been arrested, much had happened on the outside. His son Marco’s wife had given birth to a baby girl whom Notarbartolo had seen only during his family’s infrequent visits to the prison. His close friend Mimmo Falleti—Antonino Falleti’s brother—had died of cancer.

Notarbartolo kept up with the news of his friends and family with an expensive telephone habit. Prisoners were allowed phone calls, but only if they paid exorbitant fees for them. Notarbartolo spent about
4,000 per year, a fortune considering that most prisoners were stone broke. He was never foolish enough to risk a call to Finotto, D’Onorio, or Tavano. So he could only imagine how they were spending their time, and their money, while he waited in the overcrowded prison for the trial to start.

On Thursday, January 13, 2005, the disagreement over which language to use in the summonses veered in a direction the defendants never expected: The appeals court upheld the lower court’s order that the summonses be translated into Italian, but also declared that the trial would be held at the appellate level, not first at the Correctional Court level. Doing so meant that the appeals court would try the case directly, skipping the lower court level completely. In other words, the defendants had one less chance of appeal; it removed an entire layer of the process. There was nothing comparable in U.S. criminal law.

This move may have been unexpected, but it wasn’t accidental; Prosecutor Ben Theunis said that his office decided to appeal the translation issue with an eye toward convincing the appeals court to take the case away from the trial court. It was a cagey attempt to exploit this unique feature of Belgian jurisprudence to deny an avenue of appeal to the defendants. And it paid off.

“It’s a kind of strategic move,” Theunis said years later. “We had this judgment [regarding the order to translate the summonses into Italian] and we decided we will go into appeal ourselves. Of course, we thought about the fact that the Court of Appeal could keep the case.”

To ensure the court knew of its options, “there was a suggestion” from the prosecutors’ office to the judge that the case stay at the appellate level, Theunis said. The defendants’ lawyers argued against it, but in vain.

“Of course, from the prosecutors’ point of view this was a good thing because the accused, they lost an appeal,” Theunis admitted.

The Supreme Court in Belgium was now the only higher authority available to review the outcome of the case, and that court heard only appeals based on errors of law. The key issues at stake in this trial were not ones of law, but of fact: Were the defendants involved in the robbery and, in Notarbartolo’s case, was he the ringleader? The Antwerp Court of Appeal was highly regarded; it was unlikely the judges would commit any errors of law.

This development meant that, for all practical intents, the verdict of this one court was final and non-reviewable. Notarbartolo and his fellow defendants had just one roll of the dice to find out if they would go to jail for five to ten years or go free.

The trial moved from the Correctional Court to the Court of Appeal building at Britse Lei 35A, just a three-minute drive from the Prison of Antwerp. The industrial-looking court house, built in the 1960s, was clearly influenced by the architecture of the time.

Courtroom A, the first on the left when entering the building, was almost perfectly cube-shaped, with a high ceiling. Adorned with a few wooden pews facing a long bracket-shaped table for the judges and court staff, the echoey room was bare of decorations, save for a tiny no-frills institutional clock that was the only relief on a vast wall of brown bricks behind the judges’ bench. The judges sat on bright orange kindergarten-style plastic chairs that were a few shades more intense than the orange carpeting on their dais. These clashed mightily with fluorescent green desk pads and the electric blue curtains. To complete the palate, one wall was painted mustard yellow and the main door bright red. Fluorescent tubes hummed overhead. Overall, the room looked more likely to host Alcoholics Anonymous meetings than criminal trials.

The press was allowed to take pictures and film in the lobby, but not in the courtroom itself. The only pictures they were able to capture of the Man of Gold during the trial were snapped as police escorted him to and from the courtroom. Notarbartolo looked bookish and mild-mannered in casual civilian clothes and eyeglasses.

Although six people were on trial, only three defendants showed that day: Antonino Falleti, Leonardo Notarbartolo, and Adriana Crudo. The charges against Zwiep had been dropped, but she came to court to support her husband. The members of the School of Turin still hiding out in Italy—Finotto, D’Onorio, and Tavano—had hired Belgian attorneys, although these lawyers did not fully participate in the court case. The lawyers for the three defendants present in court needed to aggressively defend their clients since they faced immediate detention should they be convicted. The lawyers for the men in Italy, on the other hand, had a different and less straightforward role to play.

Of course their clients wanted to be acquitted, but these lawyers needed to tailor their participation carefully, with an eye toward later arguments in an Italian court over matters of extradition, were the men ever to be arrested. A likely argument would be that a Belgian conviction should be ignored on the basis that they were not present at their trial. In anticipation of such a situation, their lawyers needed to make a difficult decision. They could vigorously defend their clients in court in the hopes of getting them acquitted, or they could carefully limit their involvement by simply observing the proceedings. They could then later argue that their clients did not have full representation at trial.

The presiding judge sat in the middle and asked the majority of the questions, while the two associate judges flanking him mostly listened. Despite the difference in titles, they were theoretically equals; after the evidence was presented and the arguments heard, they would deliberate the verdict behind closed doors. The majority decision would stand as the unanimous decision, since there were no dissenting opinions accompanying Belgian verdicts as there were in the United States. Any dissent about a decision would stay between the three of them.

The trial also differed from those in the United States in that neither party called witnesses to testify before the court. Instead, sworn statements were simply admitted into evidence as part of the case file.

On March 10, 2005, the defense lawyers were finally able to make their arguments in court. Notarbartolo’s lawyer, Walter Damen, argued that his client was not the ringleader. Damen wisely did not try to argue Notarbartolo’s innocence—the evidence was difficult to dispute—but instead focused on arguing that the real mastermind remained safely in Italy. As Damen had said a year before on
Primetime Live
, when asked about his client’s innocence, “Obviously, he isn’t the most innocent guy you’re likely to meet. I do agree that there is a series of important elements that indicate that Notarbartolo knows something about what happened. But there’s always a minimum and a maximum penalty. We are looking for the minimum.”

If successful, this tactic would cut Notarbartolo’s sentence from a mandatory ten years to only five if he were found guilty. Considering he’d already served more than two years awaiting trial, it was possible under this scenario that he could be released before the end of the year, taking into account good behavior as a factor in early release, which was common in Belgium. Notarbartolo had been careful to be a model prisoner.

“When that gang in fact operates from Italy, and the real boss, therefore, sits there, then my client is not the leader and so the maximum penalty should be five years,” Damen argued before the judges.

The lawyer’s argument was not without merit. Even the lead investigators—both in Italy and Belgium—had doubts that Notarbartolo was the “mastermind” who coordinated, organized, and financed every detail of the Diamond Center heist. An operation of that complexity required a lot of financial backing. Rent alone at the office and the apartment had cost about
30,000 over the course of the planning for the heist. Other expenses such as airfare, technical equipment, and machining and engineering costs were harder to calculate with certainty, but they added up to sizable bill over the more than two years of plotting and reconnaissance. Notarbartolo may have been the face of the School of Turin as its crafty inside man, but those investigating the case were relatively sure he wasn’t the leader. Detectives in both countries agreed that whoever masterminded the Diamond Center heist had never been identified. That didn’t mean, however, that they thought Notarbartolo should be shown any leniency—they would be happy to see him serve as long of a sentence as possible for all the charges against him.

At least one reporter,
La Stampa
’s Lodovico Poletto, thought it unlikely that Notarbartolo had the acumen to mastermind such a complex and delicate job. Despite the mythology surrounding Notarbartolo, thanks to the lionizing press coverage, Poletto continued to consider him just a skilled amateur swept up in the plans of greater men. He suspected Pancrazio Chiruzzi, “the Soloist with the Kalashnikov,” might have been the brains.

After the heist hit the newspapers in 2003, Poletto tracked down Chiruzzi to discuss it with him, finding the career criminal full of admiration for the job but also willing to offer a little post-heist analysis regarding some minor details he would have done differently. Chiruzzi denied any involvement, and he was never implicated by police, but Poletto remained skeptical. “You can see the hand of Pancrazio behind all of this,” he said.

No alternate masterminds were mentioned in court, however. Notarbartolo was unwilling to address the judges. If he had talked, his legendary charm might have been able to persuade the court that someone else was the leader, but that would violate the criminal code he operated under. From the time he was arrested all the way through his trial, Notarbartolo never said a word that implicated anyone else although his lawyer blamed an unnamed person back in Italy as being the mastermind.

Another theory floating about was that Notarbartolo had been intentionally set up to take the fall for the heist by whoever dumped the trash. The thinking was that there could only be one mastermind, so Notarbartolo was being offered as the sacrificial lamb to take the longest prison sentence off the table for the rest of them.

None of the investigators gave this theory much credence, because such a double cross relied on far too many variables. The garbage was actually quite well hidden in the Floordambos if you discounted the fact that the forest was scoured almost daily by an obsessive caretaker. For the theory to make any sense, the conspirators would have had to have known Gust Van Camp would find the garbage quickly. Plus, it relied on Notarbartolo’s having the nerve to go through with his plan to badge back into the Diamond Center after the discovery of the garbage, and on his being intercepted by police. The garbage had also led investigators to four of the perpetrators, not just Notarbartolo. D’Onorio was most obviously implicated because his business card and work invoice were discovered. In fact, it had taken a fair amount of detective work to learn of Notarbartolo’s involvement.