Flawless: Inside the Largest Diamond Heist in History (36 page)

Likewise, as for the evidence against him, D’Onorio claimed he was the victim of tragic coincidences. He said he met Notarbartolo at a security conference in Milan, at which point Notarbartolo asked him about installing a security camera system in his office at the Diamond Center. D’Onorio said he told Notarbartolo that he had a client in Brussels, so the side trip to Antwerp wouldn’t be a problem. He visited the Diamond Center only to consult with Notarbartolo, he said. Regarding his DNA found on a piece of duct tape used to mask the security cameras in the vault, D’Onorio said he must have left a roll of tape in Notarbartolo’s office during the consultation and that Notarbartolo later used the tape in the commission of the crime. In all, he said he was nothing more than a “scapegoat” because of his past troubles with Italian authorities.

D’Onorio was upset that he was identified as The Genius in the
Wired
article. D’Onorio benefited from early release and found himself back home in Latina by January 2009. Speaking with the authors by phone in late spring 2009, he said he was at first angry that Notarbartolo fingered him as The Genius. But that changed when he talked with Notarbartolo, who claimed that Davis, the reporter from
Wired,
was the one responsible for identifying him. D’Onorio claims that The Genius had never been found and is still on the loose.

Detectives and criminals weren’t the only ones who were skeptical. A month after publishing Notarbartolo’s account of the crime,
Wired
printed a letter to the editor that asked, “Who, exactly, is supposed to be fooled by this silly tale? You expect us to believe that . . . these same guys wouldn’t realize that leather pouches supposedly full of diamonds are actually empty? It sounds like Notarbartolo used his time in jail to dream up the script for an
Ocean’s Eleven
prequel. He must be hoping that George Clooney will play him.”

The magazine printed a response that read, “
Wired
doesn’t make this stuff up; we even employ a sizable crew of researchers to keep things truthy [
sic
]. Still, some of you found Joshua Davis’ article hard to believe.”

Among the ways
Wired
keeps its articles “truthy,” according to Articles Editor Mark Robinson, is to verify quotes with sources. Robinson said the magazine’s researchers verified with Notarbartolo that Davis had properly transcribed what Notarbartolo told him. And acknowledging the possibility that Notarbartolo was himself less than honest, Robinson points to the very end of the story, where Davis wonders if he was lied to.

“It’s true that significant parts of the article do rely on Notarbartolo’s version of events,” Robinson wrote in an e-mail to the authors. “But as the article itself repeatedly reminds readers, Notarbartolo could have been lying.” He later added, “Notarbartolo’s claims were checked when it was possible to check them.”

However, the article contains no quotes or statements casting doubt on Notarbartolo’s claims from Peys, De Bruycker, or Denice Oliver (all of whom were quoted on other matters). The article also lacks other sources that could have raised legitimate questions as to the veracity of his tale. Anyone in the diamond business could have cast doubt on Notarbartolo’s Jewish conspiracy theory, if only they had been asked if it was common to keep diamonds in leather satchels. One doesn’t have to be a storied crook (or a crook at all) to find it outlandish that a gang like the School of Turin would have spent so much time and effort to rob the Diamond Center without taking a few seconds to verify they were stealing diamonds and not empty bags.

Peys and De Bruycker were surprised by what they read in
Wired
. In an e-mail, Peys wrote, “From what we read, most of what [Notarbartolo] is stating is absolutely wrong.”

De Bruycker said the diamond detectives have been trying to distance themselves from the article since it was published. “We participated in that thing, but we certainly take—how can I say?—distance from the theories that Joshua Davis makes about the interviews he did with Notarbartolo,” De Bruycker said. “Certain theories that he makes in his article are things that don’t come from us. That’s his account.”

On March 8, 2009, Notarbartolo was released from prison. Four days later,
Wired
posted its article online, before the magazine hit newsstands. A week later, Notarbartolo got the deal he’d been angling for:
Variety
reported on March 16 that film producer J. J. Abrams had bought the movie rights to Davis’s article as part of Abrams’s film deal with Paramount Pictures. Part of the deal Davis had arranged with Notarbartolo, according to
Hollywood Reporter
, was for Davis to obtain Notarbartolo’s “life rights,” which could be sold to a film studio, in exchange for telling his story.

Davis was named as an executive producer on the future film.

By the summer of 2009, all of the men convicted in the “heist of the century” had benefitted from early release programs in the countries where they were held and were again free men. D’Onorio was released in January, Notarbartolo in March, and Finotto and Tavano in July. The last two had served their sentences in Italy, thanks to the work of their defense attorneys who successfully argued against their extradition to Belgium.

Notarbartolo served the most time of them all—just over six years. It was hardly a steep price to pay, considering that none of the diamonds had been recovered and it was assumed the men would return to their homes to enjoy a life of quiet luxury financed by the spoils of the diamond heist.

That may well have been the case had the Italian police not been so unwilling to let the case rest. On the afternoon of July 14, 2009, the police stopped and searched Notarbartolo’s car in Milan. He was driving a brand new gray BMW 120 D five-door hatchback. It was a flashy car for a man newly released from prison, but, as with all of his other family property, the car was registered in his wife’s name.

According to press reports, police claimed Notarbartolo was stopped because he was acting “suspicious.” With him were a sixty-three-year-old man whom the police hadn’t identified and that man’s twenty-three-year-old son. All that was known at the time of this writing was that the older man was well known to the investigators in the Mobile Squadron and he was not one of the men convicted in the heist.

Of more interest to police than Notarbartolo’s traveling companions was what authorities found stuffed between the sports car’s seats: approximately a kilogram of rough and polished diamonds dispersed among twenty-one bags and one envelope. Notarbartolo claimed he bought the diamonds in London and that there were not gem quality diamonds, but cheap industrial diamonds. A few days later, he produced a receipt for their purchase showing that the diamonds had been bought on June 3, 2008 (while he was in prison), for
10,450 from a company called Profile Business Service Limited of London. Italian police believed the receipt was a fake.

The diamonds were confiscated and, once again, the Italian and Belgian police focused their attention on Leonardo Notarbartolo. Italian police e-mailed photos of the diamonds to the Belgian detectives. From the pictures, De Bruycker could see they were a mixture of rough and polished stones, but without analyzing them in a lab, it was impossible to tell whether they were connected to the heist. He immediately began making arrangements to fly to Italy to retrieve the diamonds for testing in Belgium, which required permission from the Italian courts. The detectives were elated at the prospect that the goods might be part of the loot that they had given up hope of recovering.

“We are, of course, very excited. Can you imagine?” De Bruycker said a few days after he’d received the news. “Of course, our task is to see if these diamonds originated from the theft in 2003.”

The excitement soon turned to frustration, however. While it would take only a few hours for experts to compare the confiscated goods to the inventory of stolen stones, Italian bureaucracy soon proved as hard to cut through as the diamonds themselves. The detectives waited months for the Italians to permit them to take possession of the stones. As summer turned to autumn, still the diamonds remained unanalyzed. “It’s too long, but it’s not in our hands, it’s not in our power. We’re waiting for the permission to come,” said Detective Kris De Bot in late September.

Even if the diamonds proved to be from the heist, Notarbartolo would be unlikely to face new charges unless the detectives could build a separate case against him.

“Leo cannot be condemned anymore for the same thing,” De Bruycker said. “He was convicted for the theft, so [even if he were] to sell these diamonds, you cannot convict him anymore. Of course, we can confiscate [the diamonds] and maybe—maybe—there are possibilities for a new investigation in Italy on money laundering, but those are things that we have to discuss with the colleagues and the magistrates in Italy.

“You can’t convict the thief for stealing something and then convict him again for selling it,” De Bruycker said.

It’s a different story for the two men who were in the car with Notarbartolo when the diamonds were discovered. Since they were not among those convicted of the heist, investigators might bring charges against them if they can show they received, trafficked, or dealt in any way with the stolen diamonds.

Of course, there was also the possibility that Notarbartolo was telling the truth, that these were low-value industrial diamonds having nothing to do with the Diamond Center heist. Once the diamond detectives have the stones, it will be easy for them to get an expert determination as to whether they are cheap industrials worth around
10,000 (as Notarbartolo claimed) or valuable stones worth a small fortune.

No matter how this situation played out, no one in the Diamond District expected it to lead to a full recovery of the stolen goods.

“Maybe it’s the beginning of the recovery of some or all of the diamonds, but people here are very realistic,” said Philip Claes of the AWDC. “They took so many things with them that people realize that it’s almost impossible to recover everything.”

Indeed, Claes said that rather than being hopeful that the discovery would lead to a positive conclusion, the general mood among the people in the Diamond District was one of anger. “The feeling here is that they got out very early,” Claes said. “They’ve done their time and that’s it. Now they can start spending money if they do it in a cautious way . . . That’s frustrating. When you know what they took with them, they earned their money very fast.

“Maybe you can ask yourself, ‘Is it all worthwhile?’ when they are released so early,” he said.

That may be a question the diamond detectives ponder after seeing the thieves they worked so hard to catch released from prison after just a handful of years, but for Notarbartolo, Finotto, Tavano, and D’Onorio, the answer is clear. The risk, the difficulty, and even their capture and incarceration for the largest diamond heist in history seems to have been well worth the price they paid.

They have the rest of their lives—and a fortune in stolen diamonds—to make up for lost time.

JOINT ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book has been a long time in the making and was reliant on the generous help of numerous people in several countries.

Our list of thanks must start with our literary agents, Scott Hoffman of Folio Literary Management and Ayesha Pande of Collins Literary Agency. Their hard work and dedication early in the process made this book possible. Everyone at the Union Square Press imprint of Sterling Publishing showed amazing dedication and support for the book at every step of the way. Editor Iris Blasi is deserving of special thanks for championing this book and working tirelessly to make it shine. Without her help, this would have been a lesser work. Thanks as well to production editor Mary Hern, copyeditor Jessie Leaman, designer Gavin Motnyk, and publicist Caroline Mann. Also, we’d like to thank Philip Turner for seeing the value in our project early on.

For help with understanding various Italian legal issues, we would like to thank Ciro Grandi of the University of Ferrara and Franco Impalà. Special thanks go to Valentina Zuccherino for help with Italian law and translation, but also with our research while in Turin.

We would like to thank several journalists, but none more so than Simon Surowicz, formerly of ABC’s
Primetime Live
. Without his initial work on this story, it’s safe to say that later reporters would have had a far more difficult, if not impossible, time locating sources and information. We would also like to thank Michael Freilich of
Joods Actueel,
filmmaker Todd Moss, Lodovico Poletto of
La Stampa,
and Jean-Charles Verwaest of
Het Nieuwsblad
.

Special thanks go to the members of diamond squad of the Belgian Federal Police of Antwerp and the Squadra Mobile of the Italian State Police in Turin. Also to Peter Kerkhof, Crime Scene Officer, Belgian Federal Police, Antwerp Forensics Lab.

In Antwerp, we would like to thank Lucien Cornelissens, the director of the Antwerpsche Diamantkring, for a tour of his bourse in February 2006; the staff of the Antwerp World Diamond Centre, especially Karin De Mulder for a tour of the Beurs voor Diamanthandel; and Jennie Baeten for a tour of the HRD laboratory. In addition, Philip Claes, Chief Officer of Corporate Affairs for the AWDC, was extremely helpful.

In Amsterdam, Barry Wels, Annet Crouwel, and Paul Crouwel shared their expertise in lock picking and safe cracking. Pieter De Vlaam, Manager of Testing and Certification of LIPS/Gunnebo, helped immensely with vault issues and LIPS history. Paul De Vos provided invaluable information about the Diamond Center’s vault and was more than hospitable with his time. Thanks for the waffles and the wine, Paul.

For help with Antwerp and its rich diamond related history, thanks go to Vera Verschooren of Stad Antwerpen/Toerisme Antwerpen; Marteen Gillis and the Antwerp Diamond Museum; and the Stadsarchief of Stad Antwerpen.

Others who contributed valuable help include Johanna Bergman Lodin for research in Sierra Leone; Michael Maggiano and Jennifer Dawn Rogers for advice from Hollywood; Jo-Ann Garbutt; Antonino Falleti for tours of Turin and for introducing the authors to Punt e Mes and limoncello; Christophe Olsen for showing the authors around his Antwerp apartment, Leonardo Notarbartolo’s former heist headquarters; Fay Vidal; Tyler Moore; Christoffer Jerkeby; Ben Theunis; David P. McGuinn of Safe Deposit Specialists; Dr. Emmanuel Fritsch, professor at the University of Nantes; Denice Oliver of Oliver Insurance Services; Lieve Peeters of Infinity Diamonds; David Horowitz of IDH Diamonds; Retired Brig. Gen. Carter W. Clark of Gemesis Corp.; August Van Camp for telling his tale yet again (thanks for the pumpkins, Gust); Stef Leunens of KBC Group NV; Carl Alberto Bettini, Antonia Bonito, Elisa Galuppi, Angela Pizzolla, and Monica Quarra for translation from Italian; Elke Van Rompuy and Leendert Trouw for translation from Flemish/Dutch; Bettina Wirbladh for translation from Portuguese; August Evans for translation from French.

Special thanks to Xennie Doolhof for her willingness to accompany the authors throughout Belgium providing translation services, and to researcher Julia Symmes Cobb for organizing and making sense of three years’ worth of documents.

Thanks to our friends Johan Åkesson and Jakob Sönnerstedt for accommodations in Antwerp, as well as their willingness to teach the authors all about Belgian beer. In Turin, thanks go to Elisa Dal Bosco and the rest of the helpful staff of the Town House 70.

There are many others who assisted in valuable ways, but who preferred to remain anonymous. We thank them for their contributions.

Greg Campbell:
I would like to thank Leonardo Notarbartolo for the gracious meeting while behind bars in Hasselt prison, and Julie Boost for not calling the police when I tested the CCTV surveillance in the Diamond Center by going to the vault level without permission. I cannot possibly thank my family enough for their love and support. My wife, Rebecca Campbell, and my son, Turner Campbell, kept me sane and grounded through many long weeks. I promise to take you guys next time I go to Italy. Thanks too to my parents for a lifetime of love and support, as well as to my close friends Chris Hondros and Joel Dyer for their advice and their enduring friendship. A special thanks is due the staff at the Bean Cycle in Fort Collins. Finally, I’d like to reiterate my thanks to my agent, Ayesha Pande, for pushing me to new heights and believing in my work. A writer couldn’t ask for a better combination of coach, guru, and therapist, and I’m in her debt.

Scott Andrew Selby:
I’d like to thank my family: my brother Todd; my parents Richard and Rikki; Maria Olga Garcia and her son Christopher; and my cousins Marc (and Vicky) Goldstone, Mitchell Goldstone, and Carl Berman.

My agent, Scott Hoffman of Folio Literary Agency, worked tirelessly to put together this book deal, and I will be forever grateful to him.

I’m indebted to the Raoul Wallenberg Center at Lund University, where I wrote my masters thesis on blood diamonds and man-made diamonds. I’d especially like to thank my thesis advisor, Professor Mpazi Sinjela.

I’ve been fortunate enough to have some amazing teachers over the years that I would like thank James Cerillo of Northfield Mount Hermon; Kathleen Moran of UC Berkeley; Stephen Sugarman of Boalt School of Law (UCB); and Daniel Meltzer, Frank Michelman, and Charles Nesson of Harvard Law.

I’d also like to thank my friends who’ve helped at some point with this project or with other projects of mine. These include Nicolette Amette, Phyllis Asher, Åsa Borgas, Mara Cates, Laura Dawson, Cori Dulmage, Janet Dreyer, Kristina Edman, Valgerður Eggertsdóttir, August Evans, Catherine Culvahouse Fox, Anna Gilbert, Heather Gordon, Grétar Halldór Gunnarsson, Jane Hait, Ashley Harder, Christina Holder, Kerstin Jonusas, Mandy Jonusas, David Kairis, Kate Klonick, Kate Lacey, Katherine Lampert, Rachel McCullough-Sanden, Gabriel Meister, Annie O’Hare, Jessica Pilot, Annabel Raw, William Salzmann, Jeremy Sirota, Alfred “Dave” Steiner, Amber Sterling, Sara Turner, Miako Ushio, Nader Vossoughian, Evan Webb, and Abigail Wick.

Finally, thanks to the cafés where I’ve worked on this project over the years. In New York City: Blackbird Parlour, Café Gitane, El Beit, McNally Jackson Café, Marlow, Mud, Teany, Think Coffee, and Verb. In Orange County, California: Neighborhood Cup. In Malmö (Sweden): Glassfabriken and Café Simpan.