Flawless: Inside the Largest Diamond Heist in History (5 page)

When the doors slid open on the fifth-floor landing, the view was as lowrent as Notarbartolo’s apartment. The main corridor, badly in need of a fresh coat of paint, was grimy off-white with a dismal gray trim on the door frames. The walls were scuffed and dinged from years of careless movers wrestling tables and desks into the offices.

Only once he was inside office number 516 did Notarbartolo allow himself to relax. This was his sanctuary; there would be no cameras here unless he installed them himself.

Notarbartolo’s Diamond Center hideout offered precious few distractions. There was no reason, he figured, to waste time or money furnishing it or decorating it with fake documents on the walls. He never planned to have anyone visit, at least not anyone who would expect to see the regular trappings of a diamond merchant. This was practical, perhaps, but it also created an obstacle he might not have anticipated: tedium.

Notarbartolo knew he must spend several hours in the office during each of his visits to give the illusion that he was working. It would surely arouse suspicion if his computerized badge traffic showed he spent only a half hour at a time in the building. Since his real work needed to take place outside the office, he made sure to bring with him several Italian-language newspapers and magazines to kill time. He was fortunate that the newspaper vendor across Schupstraat from the Diamond Center carried several Italian publications, lifesavers that kept him from pacing a hole in the carpet for hours on end. He also brought with him a pad of paper and some pencils. Pulling up a chair, he settled behind the desk and took notes on what he’d seen so far, drew a few preliminary sketches, and created the first of many to-do lists. The office was very quiet except for the sound of his pencil scratching on the notepad.

After an appropriate amount of time passed, he took his briefcase to the elevator and hit the button for floor -2, the vault level. When the doors slid open, he was again finely tuned to note and record to memory as much detail as possible. He noticed, for example, that although there were three elevators that served the upper floors of B Block, only two came to the bottom floor. He saw that the only decoration on the walls of the vault foyer was a framed diagram of the fire escape route, which conveniently showed which of the four doors in the foyer opened into the stairwell. He heard how the whole floor echoed, the tile amplifying every small cough and footstep. He made a mental note to wear sneakers when the time came.

He walked to the day gate that provided entry to the safe room, immediately memorizing the brand name printed on both the intercom keypad and the keypad connected to the magnetic alarm. He noted the manual fire alarm lever, a small camera in a smoked glass dome over the door and the flexible steel pipe containing the magnetic alarm’s bundle of cables that vanished into the ceiling overhead.

Notarbartolo pressed the intercom buzzer and waited. As a new tenant, he was prepared to announce his name through the squawk box, so the guard on the main floor could confirm him as one of the safe deposit box renters. When the door clicked, Notarbartolo casually examined the jamb as he pushed it open. He didn’t notice any overt signs that the day gate was alarmed; he made a mental note to keep checking this on subsequent visits. When he stepped inside and let go of the door, he heard the muted hiss of pneumatic hinges slowly closing the gate behind him.

Entering the vault, Notarbartolo stepped directly to his safe deposit box, number 149. When he’d rented the box, Boost had given him a small metal key with an oval handle and a two-inch-long round pipe. The end of the pipe was fitted with over-and-under metal flanges. Known as the “stamp,” this was the part of the key that operated the lock. The silver-colored key fit into a horizontal slot in a round brass plug on the left side of the door. Three golden knobs adorned with all twenty-six letters of the alphabet around their circumference lined up horizontally to the right of the keyhole.

Once alone in the vault, Notarbartolo could finally begin the exploration he’d been itching to do. He dialed in his three-letter code on the worn golden dials, inserted the key, and twisted it clockwise. As he did so, a brass deadbolt inside the lock retracted from its slot in the doorjamb and the door swung smoothly open on its hidden internal hinges. With the box’s door open, he twisted the key to the locked position and watched the deadbolt extend from the lock. He guessed it was an inch long, two inches tall, and a quarter of an inch thick. He would make precise measurements later—repeatedly. His first visit to the vault was just for the sake of walking around, opening his box, and getting the lay of the land.

Returning to his office, Notarbartolo transcribed his mental notes. Although his safe deposit box had been empty, it did contain one thing of immense value: a clue as to how it might be opened without a key or a combination. Notarbartolo hurriedly worked to capture everything while it was fresh in his mind. After he’d emptied his brain, he shuffled again through the pages and considered his mission. It was daunting.

Among the long list of security measures he would have to overcome, there was one glimmer of good news. Despite fortifications that would have made most thieves give up before they even began, the Diamond Center had a glaring weakness that a criminal as experienced as Notarbartolo would most certainly have noticed right away. Though most of the building was within the SADA, surrounded by the cocoon of cameras, cops, and ram-proof vehicle barriers, not all of it was.

The garage doors of C Block opened directly onto Lange Herentalsestraat, outside the security zone. There were cameras on that street, of course, and the police substation was close to the garage doors. The thieves would still have to dodge video surveillance; sidestep police patrols; enter the locked building without being detected; somehow penetrate the LIPS door without setting off the alarm; bypass motion detectors, infrared detectors, and light detectors; crack nearly two hundred locked safes and make off with as much loot as could be carried, all without alerting the onsite caretakers or being given away by a battery of closed-circuit TV cameras. But this major security hole might just be the key to pulling off the heist.

With the first stage of his reconnaissance mission complete, it was time for Notarbartolo to return to Italy, where his team of expert lock pickers, safecrackers, and alarm specialists awaited their briefing.

Chapter Two

THE SCHOOL OF TURIN

“This is the city of Turin, the industrial capital of Italy. The most modern in Europe, famed for its architecture and soon, I trust, for the greatest robbery of the twentieth century.”

—
The Italian Job
(1969)

If anyone at the Diamond Center had called the Italian police to check on their new tenant, they would have eventually been transferred to Marco Martino. And if they’d ask him if he’d ever heard of a Turin resident named Leonardo Notarbartolo, it would have been like asking the Catholic police commander if he attended Mass regularly.

“Of course,” Martino would have said, followed quickly by, “Why do you ask?”

Such a phone call never happened, but if it had, it may well have stopped the plot to rob the Diamond Center in its tracks. Martino would have pulled out the thick salmon-colored file folder with Notarbartolo’s name emblazoned on it that he kept near at hand. The file was filled with details of the jeweler’s criminal life that would have been more than the Diamond Center needed to know.

Martino’s official title was Lieutenant Colonel Adjutant of the Questora di Torino, Squadra Mobile. In short, he was the commander of the police department’s Mobile Squadron, a specially trained unit of police detectives who tackled vice, corruption, and organized crime in Turin.

The names of Notarbartolo and his associates were well known on the third floor of the medieval-looking police department. The dense and bustling city of Turin was known for many things—its world-class art and architecture, the holy shroud believed by many to be Christ’s burial cloth, the area’s checkered history as an automotive manufacturing center—but Martino and his team focused on an aspect of the city that rarely made the tourist guidebooks: its unique criminal element.

In terms of its underworld, Turin had two major distinctions: it was an organized-crime stronghold bitterly fought over in the 1980s and 1990s by warring Mafia clans and it was also home to the most successful band of jewelry thieves in the world. Because Mafia crimes dominated the detectives’ time as they struggled to ensure Turin never got as bad a reputation as Naples or Palermo, the gang of jewel thieves was able to operate just outside of the police’s grasp. And so, for over a decade, the bandits looted Turin’s jewelry stores in a citywide spree that the cops seemed powerless to stop.

It was a particularly frustrating crime wave because the thieves were unusually clever and elusive. Martino knew who most of them were, but due to their singular skill in pulling off the heists, they got away with their crimes more often than they were caught and punished for them. Those arrested were usually out on the streets within a few years at most. Smart criminals employed smart lawyers.

Martino was a very disciplined detective, and he knew that patience was his ally in building a case against the likes of Notarbartolo and his associates. The more they operated, the more likely they were to slip up and get caught with their hands in a big enough cookie jar that they would do real time. But Martino was also human, and it frustrated him that the criminals’ time had not yet come.

The jewelry heists had tapered off in the late 1990s. Martino knew the thieves’ modus operandi well enough that this hiatus didn’t signal retirement. It just meant that they were onto another score and were busy plotting its details. If anyone at the Diamond Center had called as he was turning these thoughts over in his mind, Martino would have seen the picture immediately.

But no one did.

To understand how Turin produced thieves of Notarbartolo’s caliber, it is important first to understand the city itself.

Turin is ancient, dating back to before the time of Hannibal, the Carthaginian general who marched his army over the French Alps from Iberia at the beginning of the Second Punic War in the third century BCE. Descending from the Alpine foothills leading from France into Italy, Hannibal discovered the Taurini tribe living in a valley formed by four rivers: the Po, Dora Riparia, Stura di Lanzo, and Sangone. The people who then lived in the area that would be Turin did not survive their encounter with the famous general.

The conquerors settled into the verdant and temperate northwestern Italian Piedmont, a natural gateway between the larger European continent and the Mediterranean Italian peninsula. The area’s strategic importance to invading armies was such that military leaders were compelled to stop and pay proper homage to Turin’s rulers. To pass through the city en route to battlefields in France, Switzerland, or elsewhere in Italy required the permission of local leaders.

In the first century BCE, Julius Caesar established a fort near the Po River and granted Roman citizenship to those living nearby. Portions of the ancient twenty-four-foot-high brick walls Caesar erected around the small city still stand. So too does the Roman Quarter, the Quadrilatero Romano, where the ancient Roman buildings now house trendy restaurants, cafés, and fashion retailers.

The Savoy dynasty left its own impact on the city when it ruled a shifting area that included parts of present-day Italy and France from palaces in Turin. As the center of its empire, Turin enjoyed lavish architectural and cultural attention from the Savoys, whose artists filled its streets with stunning Baroque buildings,
piazze
as wide as airport runways, and public works of art. The grand and opulent royal palaces, residences, churches, and government buildings survived invasion by the French, occupation by Napoleon, and Allied bombing strikes during World War II.

Most of those structures also survived the rise and fall of industrialization. Turin’s claim to economic fame was the Fiat automobile company, which was founded in 1899. It provided Turin with its economic heart, attracting waves of poor and largely uneducated Italians who migrated north in search of a better life. In Turin, industries like Fiat promised work and stability. By 1951, some four hundred thousand people had migrated to northern Italy, primarily to Milan and Turin—two hours apart by car—and to smaller villages on their outskirts.

The southerners brought friction to their new home. To the more prosperous Turinese, their southern countrymen were illiterate embarrassments, crude and uncouth. Many of them came from Sicily, Calabria, and Naples, the home of Cosa Nostra and ’Ndrangheta mobsters since the 1800s. Indeed, by 1971, nearly 13 percent of Turin’s population hailed from Calabria, Sicily, and Campania, areas notoriously dense with Mafia.

Such migration continued well into the twentieth century, as northern Italy continued to offer more economic opportunities and prosperity than the south. Notarbartolo was part of this migration; he was born in 1952 in Palermo, the capital of Sicily, and later moved with his family to Turin when his father sought work there as a truck driver.

Of course Turin had been no stranger to crime prior to the influx of Mob families and their associates. But these newcomers brought with them a sophistication that the police were ill equipped to handle. Drug trafficking, illegal gambling, and prostitution bloomed to new proportions in the postwar years and took root, quietly but firmly. Mafia activity from the 1950s through the 1980s was so prominent in places like Naples, Palermo, Moscow, New York, and New Jersey that the organization’s expansion to northern Italy, especially Turin and Milan, went largely unnoticed except for those Italian anti-Mafia crusaders who spent their careers tracking the Mob’s movements.

The Mob had a hand in everything from money laundering and real estate to politics and the administrations of Turin’s local football teams, Juventus FC and Torino FC. Another notorious mainstay of Mafia business—extortion—was also among their rackets. It was fundamentally simple: a business owner would receive a phone call or a visit from strangers demanding payments that could reach as high as $200,000. They usually got paid, though it sometimes took a few firebombs or pistol shots fired through windows to encourage the payments. In Turin, a tire factory was set on fire, along with its stock of 30,000 tires, when the owner refused to pay. Knowing the possible outcomes, most owners ended up making some arrangement. In the early nineties, it was estimated that 60 percent of all businesses in Palermo paid the Mob
il pizzo
, the term for this protection fee. In Catania, an estimated 90 percent of business owners paid up, so much that the local chamber of commerce proposed making
il pizzo
tax deductible.

From the 1970s through the 1990s, detectives like Martino were inordinately busy trying to keep a lid on crime sprees that ended with bodies found in parks, in cars, and even on the sides of highways. Victims included not only casualties of rival factions’ turf wars, but also businessmen who refused to pay
il pizzo,
the occasional innocent bystander caught in the crossfire, and the police themselves. Detectives, politicians, and judges were often whacked in particularly dramatic fashions; one judge was blown to bits by a powerful bomb that detonated as he drove down a highway near Palermo. Throughout Italy, it was nothing short of war between those who upheld the law, or tried to, and those who profited from breaking it. Turin was no exception.

Against this backdrop, attention to more pedestrian crimes like burglary all but evaporated. It was, in other words, a good time to be a crook in Turin. So long as they took care not to hurt anyone or display overt ties to the Mob, and as long as they covered their tracks well, chances were high that thieves would face at most a perfunctory investigation. The police were burdened by more pressing matters.

There was one other aspect about the city that may have been a factor in the thieves’ long successful campaign in Turin, although it’s one that Martino may have thought wise to keep to himself if he considered it at all. Turin has a somewhat hazy, but nevertheless enduring, reputation as a haven for magic. As the rumor goes, it is an intersection between the forces of white and black magic, of good and evil. Pagans attribute it to a so-called triangle of white magic formed by Turin with the cities of Lyon, France, and Prague, Czech Republic. It is said to overlap with a triangle of black magic Turin forms with San Francisco and London. Though these days the whole matter is considered by most to be an absurd superstition or an invention of the tourist industry, it wasn’t long ago when Turin’s supposedly mystical nature was accepted with less skepticism. After all, where else in the world can as miraculous an unsolved mystery as the Shroud of Turin share equal billing with the gates of hell, which are supposedly located beneath the Piazza Statuto? Even though cops look for hard clues when trying to explain the unexplainable, more than once “magic” seemed as plausible an explanation as any when trying to figure out how millions of dollars’ worth of diamonds and jewels seemed to vanish into thin air.

Considering that the main industry in Turin was an incubator for some of the most famous names in sports cars—including Ferrari, Maserati, Alfa Romeo, Pirelli, and Pininfarina—it was perhaps appropriate that a young Leonardo Notarbartolo first ran afoul of the law by stealing an Alfa Romeo 2000 Spider, a limited edition convertible hot rod manufactured between 1958 and 1961. He was nineteen when he was caught in Paris in 1971, sitting in its bordeaux leather interior listening to the AutoVox Melody stereo.

Arrested and sent back to Italy, Notarbartolo officially launched his criminal career. Over the course of the following decade, he generated a lot of paper in police stations from Genoa on the Mediterranean coast to Macerata on the Adriatic coast, on charges from speeding to auto theft. According to newspaper reports, he even had a record in Switzerland. Short stints in jail had little effect on his determination to find himself behind the wheel of yet another sports car, and even the temporary revocation of his driver’s license in 1976 didn’t deter his need for speed. He seemed intent on living up to his boyhood nickname,
Testa di Legno
, or Wooden Head. He earned it due to his tendency to head-butt people during arguments as a child, but it could just as well have applied to the stubbornness he displayed by continually breaking the law.