Flawless: Inside the Largest Diamond Heist in History (33 page)

Hasselt was more like an assisted living complex than a prison. Visitors could be forgiven for thinking the building was a modern art museum. It was smartly designed in contemporary style with artistic touches on the external façade. While Notarbartolo still lived in a cell, his Hasselt quarters were at least modern and more spacious than those in the Prison of Antwerp.

The visitor’s area resembled a mall food court, with paintwork on the floor tiles in the style of a Jackson Pollack, vending machines, and comfortable IKEA-esque tables and chairs. Within the prison, there was a small store where visitors could buy gifts for the inmates. Depending on the time of year, prisoners could receive Valentine’s presents, Christmas gifts, and Easter baskets chosen from this little kiosk. Even the outfits were nicer: canvas boat shoes, khaki pants, and a light khaki jacket worn over a blue polo shirt.

Of course, as comfortable as it might have been, it was still a prison, and Notarbartolo would have taken stock of its security features, if only out of habit. Video cameras, both hidden and overt, covered every inch of the facility. Windows lacked bars but the high-impact security glass was laced with wire mesh. Solid steel doors controlled access to the different wings and cell blocks. Biometric locks screened personnel as they moved around the building. A twenty-foot-tall fence armed with razor-sharp wire on top surrounded the entire complex.

Five months later, in October 2005, the Supreme Court of Appeal rejected Notarbartolo’s and Tavano’s appeals. Since Notarbartolo’s lawyer had introduced no written objections on issues of law during the trial, it had been clear from the start that his argument on procedures had no chance of success. But it was the only appeal available to his client, and, as such, needed to be attempted nonetheless.

Notarbartolo began counting the days.

In Italy, the others should have been busy counting their lucky stars. The ruling of the court was taken seriously in that they immediately began legal proceedings to challenge their convictions, but it meant little as long as they lay low and contented themselves with staying in Italy, where they had the best odds of never being arrested or extradited to serve their sentences. They might have settled in to enjoy a quietly luxurious lifestyle had D’Onorio not decided to take a vacation only a few months after the verdict was delivered in order to check out a real estate investment. Although he was well aware that his freedom was in jeopardy outside Italy’s borders, he boarded a plane in February 2006 and flew to the Cape Verde Islands off the coast of West Africa.

A former Portuguese colony, the Republic of Cape Verde was an archipelago nation made up of nine inhabited islands with a population of half a million. It was an up-and-coming tourist destination, where detectives believe D’Onorio traveled to scout out an investment in coastal land and perhaps even a hotel. On his return flight, he brought with him glossy brochures for property in Cape Verde. Patrick Peys believed he planned to hide at least a part of the School of Turin’s ill-gotten gains there.

While changing planes at the Lisbon airport in Portugal, D’Onorio was arrested on the morning of February 23, 2006, a little more than three years after he’d played a key role in the Antwerp diamond heist. D’Onorio now found himself an unwilling guest of the Portuguese Republic, and the timing couldn’t have been worse. While he was stuck in Portugal, his lawyers were arguing in the Belgian courts that his conviction should be overturned based, in part, on the argument that he hadn’t had the opportunity to properly defend himself because he wasn’t present in court. Finotto’s attorneys were making the same appeal. D’Onorio was arrested as a fugitive on the basis of a European Arrest Warrant (EAW) that had been issued by Judge Dirk Verhaeghe, the examining judge back when the trial level criminal court handled the diamond heist case.

At the time, the EAW was a relatively new development, the result of an agreement by European Union Member States to streamline arrest and extradition policies. Portugal had already implemented changes to its extradition procedures about two and a half years before D’Onorio’s trip.

D’Onorio fought hard in a Portuguese court against his extradition with a number of different arguments, from the very technical to “a violation of the principle of two levels of jurisdiction, because [he] was tried by the Court of Appeal in Antwerp.” He also argued that he shouldn’t be extradited to Belgium as he had not been present at the trial against him, but was instead tried in absentia.

This fight took time and, after ninety days, Portugal let D’Onorio out of detention, attempting to ensure he remained in Portugal by confiscating his passport—a move that, of course, didn’t deter the Roman from beating a hasty retreat back to Latina. The lack of a passport posed little problem to him since the countries between Portugal and Italy effectively had no hard borders, and, therefore, very little control on who passed through them. By the time the Court of Appeal of Lisbon decided on July 11, 2006, to send D’Onorio to Belgium, it was too late. He was long gone.

On October 31, 2006, the Belgian Supreme Court ruled against D’Onorio’s and Finotto’s appeals. Their sentences of five years imprisonment stood.

By 2006, Italy was proving a less hospitable refuge for a man like D’Onorio, wanted in one country and on the lam from an extradition proceeding in another. Italy was still slow to change its legal regime to accommodate EAWs—it was the last EU Member State to do so—but it slowly became more cooperative about surrendering its own citizens to other countries. D’Onorio was proving to be an embarrassment to Italy thanks to his jaunt to Cape Verde, and Belgium exerted great pressure on the Roman courts to hand him over. The computer and alarms specialist fought against this in the Italian courts for seven months, but eventually lost this battle. The diamond detectives flew from Brussels to escort D’Onorio to his new accommodations, a prison in Merksplas, Belgium. Since he’d already been tried and convicted, there were no court appearances. He went straight to jail.

After finally succeeding in D’Onorio’s extradition, the Antwerp prosecutor again requested that Italian police arrange for Finotto and Tavano to join him behind bars. This time, they were both arrested and held in Italy for possible extradition. Marco Martino, the commander of the Mobile Squadron, personally arrested Tavano in a shabby studio apartment near Fontanella’s locksmith store. The infamous criminal who’d helped orchestrate the theft of hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of diamonds didn’t even have a bed; Tavano slept on the couch.

By November 2007, all four of the convicted perpetrators were under arrest and in prison. Notarbartolo and D’Onorio were in Belgium, and Tavano and Finotto were in Italy, just beginning their own series of hearings fighting against extradition.

Chapter Thirteen

THE LOOT

A diamond is the hardest substance known to man, especially if he’s trying to get it back.

—Proverb

A few months after the big heist, a procession that was simultaneously somber and hopeful made its way through the space-age glass doors of the HRD. The victims of the robbery were a diverse crowd, young and old, elegant and gruff. Some had rented safe deposit boxes at the Diamond Center in which they kept every item of value they owned, while others were representatives of multinational corporations covered by iron-clad insurance policies. Each person badged through the HRD’s turnstiles with a visitor’s pass and headed to a ground-floor conference room filled with police detectives and diamond industry representatives.

Numbered plastic bags containing the remnants of the heist covered long tables in the middle of the room. The bags were filled with the loot that had been left on the white tile floor of the Diamond Center’s vault. After the items had been checked and tested for forensic evidence, the police had stored them in the vault of a local bank until they were ready to be returned to their rightful owners—a time that had finally come.

Quietly but thoroughly, each person went from bag to bag in the hope of finding something of theirs that the thieves had deemed not worth stealing.

Philip Claes, the HRD lawyer who had helped coordinate the return of the looted property, watched the process from a respectful distance. He was aware of how emotional it was for some of the victims, especially those who learned that nothing of theirs remained from the heist.

“For some of them, it was a personal drama,” Claes recalled, “because not only their diamonds were in the safe but also the family jewels and some savings they’d made.” It was cathartic, he said, for the victims to go through the process of examining the leftovers of the heist and to speak to the detectives about the case. “People came, they could talk about it. They could see that things were done to solve everything, that things were done to maybe give them some of their belongings back.”

Many items defied easy identification—like loose pearls. Claes was touched to see that the victims who had pearls stolen didn’t claim them unless they were certain of their ownership. None of them wanted to accidentally take anything that wasn’t theirs.

Those who found items that had come from their safe deposit boxes told Claes or one of his assistants, who jotted down the bag number and the name of the claimant. “Some of them were very cool. ‘Okay, this is mine. Great. Thank you very much,’” Claes recalled. “Others were really happy. If you see that the ring of your grandmother is there, it has an emotional value. Maybe it is worth nothing, but it has an emotional value. Then you really saw it on their faces that they were extremely happy that they had recovered it.”

Other victims had less luck, circling the tables again and again that day, and returning throughout the week for another look. Some brought their spouses or friends on subsequent visits, hoping they might recognize something that they had missed.

Fay Vidal was among the lucky ones. Even though she had looked in vain through the debris on the floor the morning the heist was discovered, she decided to go to the HRD on the chance that she overlooked something.

“I still found a few things that I hadn’t found in this enormous heap on the floor,” she said. “I had a few stones in amethyst and turquoise that I bought once and never made anything out of it. And then someone comes up to me and says, ‘Isn’t this yours?’ It was a little hanger in gold with a teenyweeny little diamond on it, and on the back it was my daughter’s name. She’d received that from her grandmother when she was small on her birthday. So [the thieves] couldn’t do anything with that.”

At the end of the week, the list of claimed items was tallied. Out of the multitude of things the School of Turin had left behind, only two—a gold bracelet and a watch—were claimed by more than one party. Mediators from the World Federation of Diamond Bourses settled those situations privately.

There were also many things that weren’t claimed, mostly small loose diamonds, pearls, and other gems that were difficult to identify. Those were gathered up and held at the World Federation of Diamond Bourses for a year. When no other claimants stepped forward in that time, the items were sold and the money donated to a local charity. Even these dregs of the heist, the crumbs that the thieves discarded and were left unclaimed by their rightful owners, amounted to a small windfall. Aside from the School of Turin, the charity was the only beneficiary of the Diamond Center heist.

Claes said that while it was cathartic to see the perpetrators of the crime sentenced and eventually jailed, it wasn’t what was most important to the victims. “The most important thing is, where are the other belongings?” he said. “Where are the diamonds?”

The reported amount stolen came to at least 100,000 carats of rough and polished diamonds; thirty-three pounds of pure gold; cash in various currencies amounting to at least $1.5 million; more than two dozen premium men’s and women’s watches from designers such as Rolex, Venus, Omega, and Bulgari; and millions of dollars’ worth of securities, rare coins, and jewelry. The stolen jewelry included hundreds of earrings, bracelets, pendants, chains, brooches, and tie clips. They were made of gold, platinum, and silver and contained a galaxy of precious stones, from pearls and emeralds to rubies and—of course—more diamonds.

Thirty safe deposit box owners reported their losses of cash and goods as “unspecified,” meaning that the total haul was far bigger than the accounting listed in court records and on insurance claims. Although police estimate the thieves could have made off with as much as a half a billion dollars’ worth of loot, insurance payouts only amounted to $21 million.

Investigators never settled on an official estimate of the take, although three days after the heist was discovered they announced that it was over
100 million ($108 million at the exchange rate at the time of the heist, $140 million at the time of this writing in July 2009). As the investigation proceeded, the estimate went up. During the trial, a prosecutor told the judges that he believed the amount stolen to be closer to
400 million. During an interview in 2008, when asked about the original figure of
100 million, Belgian detective Patrick Peys said, “I assure you it’s more.” He believed the take may have been as high as
400 million (which would have been $432 million at the time of the heist and $560 million at the time of this writing in 2009).

The list of items that were recovered beyond the confines of the vault was far smaller: a few hundred dollars found in Finotto’s girlfriend’s safe in France; the foreign currency from the garbage in the Floordambos; a pinch of emerald pointers recovered from the Floordambos and the fibers of the rug Falleti had been carrying; and small diamond shards found in the vacuum bag and on the floor of the Charlottalei apartment. Their combined worth wasn’t much more than the face value of the cash.

Everything else vanished, including the cash and diamonds that had surfaced briefly during the Mobile Squadron’s initial search of Notarbartolo’s house in Trana. The last place detectives believe the bounty was all in one place was at the rendezvous site near Lake Iseo, but what happened to it when the School of Turin went their separate ways was anyone’s guess. If the entire haul had been exchanged for cash to an unknown fence, mastermind, or financier, then not even the men who stole it would know its whereabouts now.

The most likely fate of the stolen goods was that they were divided into categories and disposed of separately. The euros taken during the heist could have been laundered through the School of Turin’s legitimate businesses. The earrings, rings, pendants, and necklaces that were too distinct to risk selling could have been disassembled, the gemstones added to the pile of loose goods while the precious metals went into their own piles depending on whether they were silver, gold, or platinum. One diamond ring alone was valued at more than a million dollars, far too risky to chance selling in one piece.

The precious metals could be melted in a high-temperature furnace and then poured into casts of any shape and size so that they would be impossible to identify.

Gold mixed with other metals—such as copper or zinc—had to be smelted in order to purify it, a process that involved melting the metal and adding chemicals to separate the different components. Smelting required chemistry skills and was dangerous—drop an open container of molten gold at your feet and at best, you’ll be burned to the bone—but it ensured the thieves would get full market value for the gold, and rendered it completely untraceable to the heist.

Items like the high-end watches would have been sold to a trusted jewelry fence. Trying to sell them at retail, such as at one of Notarbartolo’s jewelry stores, would have been too risky to contemplate. And, although it would have been tempting for one of them to slip the gold Patek Philippe watch onto his arm, it would have been an equally bad idea to keep anything so distinctive for themselves. This Swiss timepiece alone could have cost between $20,000 to well over a million dollars, depending on the model. Despite the prices some of these watches commanded, they would earn only pennies on the dollar when sold to most fences. During the robbery, the thieves were careful to keep the watches in their original packaging material when it was available, which proved their authenticity and made them less suspect when sold again further down the line.