Flawless: Inside the Largest Diamond Heist in History (37 page)

APPENDIX

Leonardo Notarbartolo

Elio D’Ornio

Ferdinando Finotto

Pietro Tavano

The four members of The School of Turin who were convicted, jailed, and released for pulling off the heist of the century:
Leonardo Notarbartolo
, the charming inside man who for more than two years played the part of a mild-mannered Italian diamantaire;
Ferdinando Finotto
, the well-rounded master criminal whose failed 1997 bank robbery provided a template for the 2003 Diamond Center heist;
Elio D’Onorio
, the alarms specialist who most likely discovered the ingenious solutions to defeating the Diamond Center’s most daunting security measures; and
Pietro Tavano
, Notarbartolo’s longtime trusted friend who was later blamed for sending them all to prison.

This tattered invoice from Elio D’Onorio, which gives an estimate on the cost of installing a video surveillance system at Leonardo Notarbartolo’s front company, was pieced together by detectives after it was found with the heist garbage in the Floordambos. It was one of many clues that led to the identification of those who robbed the Diamond Center.

HISTORIC HEISTS

Putting together a list of the ten biggest heists turned out to be a much more complicated task than one would expect. The first issue that came up was deciding what constitutes a “heist.”

We omitted any cases in which a government took money from its own bank, as happened before the fall of Nazi Germany or Iraq. The same rationale applies to corruption by a government leader such as former Philippines President Ferdinand Marcos and his wife Imelda. We also took out art heists, since values for stolen famous works do not reflect the actual market value of the stolen goods. For example, if someone stole the
Mona Lisa,
it could be valued at an astronomical figure, but no one would buy it for anything near what it’s worth. Its real value would be what it could fetch on the black market, which would be very little, or in reward or in ransom.

The next issue was the amount stolen. Although news reports used specific figures for the amounts believed to have been taken, numerous problems often exist with such numbers. As we’ve seen with the Antwerp diamond heist, the amounts given are generally estimates and sometimes it’s hard to put an exact number on the losses, such as with a safe deposit box job. Even when a single business, such as Harry Winston, was hit, the question arises whether the amount cited was the wholesale value or the retail value and how much the thieves could expect to make fencing such goods.

Another problem pertains to currency exchanges. For instance, the estimate given by police at the time of the Antwerp diamond heist was more than
100 million. A prosecutor later alleged it was closer to
400 million. We used the exchange values at the time of the heist, but that lowers the dollar amount of the Antwerp diamond heist versus the Harry Winston heist as the value of the euro against the dollar went up in the meantime, making the two amounts look much closer in dollars than they do in euros.

The Graff Diamonds heist happened after this chart had first been drawn up, knocking the Brink’s-Mat heist from the “World’s Ten Biggest Heists.” Brink’s-Mat was the theft of three tons of gold worth $37.5 million at the time. It took place on November 26, 1983, in London.

World’s Ten Biggest Heists:

World’s Five Biggest Jewel Heists:

Sources for amounts of heists:

1. Diamond Center: Three days after the heist was discovered, authorities released an estimate of at least
100 million. Given that it was a safe deposit robbery, an exact figure for the amount stolen was impossible to obtain. 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. The exchange rate at the time of the heist, February 15, 2003, was 1 euro to 1.08 dollars. Some American news reports forgot to convert the figure at all, giving an erroneous number of $100 million. The euro has since gone up in value so if it were converted at the same time as, say, the 2008 Harry Winston heist, it would produce a much higher dollar figure. For instance, at the time of this writing, July 4, 2009, 1 euro was worth about 1.40 dollars, which would put the value of this heist at $140 million to $560 million. If this chart were in euros, it would be clearer that the Antwerp diamond heist was much bigger than the runner-up with
100–400 million versus
80 million for Harry Winston.