Flawless: Inside the Largest Diamond Heist in History (7 page)

As with smoking, Notarbartolo didn’t believe in gambling. He believed in the sure thing. He used these rooms to hold conversations that weren’t meant to be overheard. He traded jewels and cash beneath the tables to stock his showroom windows. He also used these little espresso dens, which were scattered throughout Turin, for covert meetings with his more nefarious associates.

It would be a few years more before the thieves’ activities were well known enough to earn them the moniker “the School of Turin.” At the time, plotting intricately detailed jewelry heists in dimly lit back rooms, they were nothing more than a band of shadows.

Those whom the police considered members of the School of Turin would have most likely never counted themselves as part of it. Mainly that’s because “it” didn’t exist, not really. There were no official meetings, no roster of members, no roll calls, no secret handshakes, and not even a name. They understood that to name a thing is the first step in controlling it. As long as they remained under the general public’s radar, the better off they were.

The name School of Turin was coined in the late 1990s by a newspaper reporter who needed a handy way of referring to the group of men responsible for the wave of jewelry heists. Eventually, even the cops started using the term too. It made sense, as the group had evolved into something of an institution of higher learning. These men had taken the crime of theft and turned it into an academic pursuit. They were masters of their craft.

The School of Turin was not technically a gang, at least not in the way that term usually applies to organized crime syndicates. Even referring to it as “organized crime” is a stretch. It wasn’t all that organized in the conventional sense. There was no structure, no hierarchy, and no real leadership. Instead, it was a loose affiliation of men who shared some common traits: They were smart, patient, and greedy. They each had specialized skills that complemented the others’.

What differentiated them from other criminal elements was their cerebral approach to each new job. The detectives who investigated their crimes believe they got just as much of a thrill from subverting a target’s security systems as they did from the take itself. The members of the School of Turin were not known for robbing at gunpoint, threatening a manager or owner into revealing a safe’s combination, or bribing a security guard to look the other way. Instead, they outsmarted every security system they encountered, whether it was physical, electronic, or human. Ingenuity was a hallmark of their operations, and they always made the best of whatever resources presented themselves. In one famous example, they ditched the high-tech approach to learning the combination of a certain store’s safe and instead sent one of their own to seduce an employee, who proved less than reliable when it came to keeping secrets from her lover.

Organizing a heist was a loose affair. A couple of guys would venture out to case a joint, often with at least one woman, someone’s wife or girlfriend, serving as cover. Nicely dressed, they would go on what looked like a shopping expedition, but which was really a surveillance operation. Paying attention to the jewels gleaming at them from under the glass cases was only part of their focus. They would spread around the room pretending to admire just the wares, when actually they were sizing up the store’s security: How many video cameras are evident? What is the make and model of the motion detector near the door? Which drawer does the clerk open to take out the keys to the display case? They also took careful note of the jewelry; perhaps the most important question in evaluating a heist was whether or not it was worth the risk.

From there, the plot would evolve organically along lines of communication that were well established in the underworld, through code words and innuendo placed with the right bartender in the right part of town. The men would gather in the back room to play cards and drink a few glasses of beer, making sure to keep their conversation as vague as possible in case the place was bugged. When they needed to go over specifics, a few of them would go for a walk around the block that might last as long as an hour.

It was then that they would go through the mental roster of who to involve. It was important that they worked with people they knew well or at least those who could be vouched for by already-trusted associates. It was a system of trust Notarbartolo would later discover in the legitimate diamond trade as well. The difference was that if the thieves picked the wrong people, they risked more than a deal going bad; they faced a long stretch in prison.

If the plan required a safecracker, they would compare notes on people they knew. They would debate the person’s skill and reputation and try to remember whether he was in the city or in jail at the moment. It wasn’t unusual that the first pick for the job was unavailable. Maybe he wasn’t interested because he didn’t like the risk, or maybe he was on vacation. Maybe he was involved in some other job at the moment. Sometimes a plan wouldn’t come together because the right people couldn’t be found to pull it off. Other times, a plot could be hatched in just weeks. And on occasion, they might formulate the perfect crime, but not commit it, preferring instead to sell the idea to someone else for a cut of the action.

After a job, that particular group might never work together again. Other times, the men might become fast friends who plotted their heists with each other in mind. Regardless, every job they pulled off added to each participant’s reputation, and over time, Turin’s thieving industry became well known even outside the realm of law enforcement. Gangsters from all parts of Italy paid a visit to its smoky cafés when they were in need of a skilled computer expert, alarm specialist, or jewelry fence.

Notarbartolo wasn’t the only School of Turin member the police were watching. Out of dozens of criminals possibly involved in this nebulous ring, Martino’s squad had identified several others that the mild-mannered jeweler associated with regularly. The best the police could do, however, was try keeping tabs on them; like Notarbartolo, they’d situated themselves just on the surface of respectable society as legitimate businessmen, retired pensioners, or honest laborers. They were careful to pay their taxes and keep proper business records. None of them wanted to risk arrest on something small; time in jail for any reason could scuttle a plan that had been in the works for months.

Because of the care the thieves took, police were powerless to do anything more than watch a suspicious business from a distance, rigging it with electronic eavesdropping equipment and watching it from the outside with video cameras. They did this with Personal Chiavi, a little locksmith store barely larger than a storage locker, which was owned by Aniello “Nello” Fontanella. Known in certain circles as the Wizard with the Keys, Fontanella had skills that extended far beyond making spare house keys for the occasional customer who wandered in. Fontanella was an expert lock picker. His business provided the perfect excuse to continually improve his craft. In his backroom workshop that was off limits to customers, he spent his days disassembling locks, manufacturing dummy keys, and perfecting the art of breaking and entering.

A regular at Fontanella’s store was his friend Giovanni Spurgo. What Fontanella was to keys, Spurgo was to alarms. Spurgo studied motion detectors, heat monitors, and light sensors so he could understand their tolerance thresholds.

There were others the police kept an eye on, including a man who, at almost seventy years old, was the grandfather of Turinese thieves, the elderly Giovanni Poliseri. He went by the nickname John the Tunisian or the King of Thieves. The police also kept an eye on Pietro Tavano, a close friend of Notarbartolo’s.

The one exception to the “keep a low profile” rule was Ferdinando Finotto, a master crook who was a jack-of-all-trades. According to the police, he knew a little about all the specialties, including alarms, locks, computers, and front companies. Where most of the other men moving in and out of this criminal orbit had, like Notarbartolo, perfected their ability to blend into their surroundings, Finotto couldn’t help but leave a memorable impression, as no manner of dress could disguise his imposing figure. Finotto stood well over six feet tall and weighed somewhere in the range of two hundred and forty pounds. His head was shaped like an anvil, and he did nothing to mitigate it with the flattop buzz cut he preferred. Had he been inclined to make an honest living, he could have been a longshoreman or a lumberjack. Instead, Finotto was convicted of attempting to rob the KBC bank in Antwerp in 1997. At the time, the bank was located on Pelikaanstraat, right outside the Diamond District.

Finotto took his skills to Antwerp in 1995, in the wake of the Italian government’s crackdown on ’Ndrangheta and other Mafia organizations through countrywide indictments that swept from Turin to Naples. With three hundred warrants issued and one hundred and fifty people arrested, it was the largest criminal roundup in Italian history. Authorities code-named it Operation Olympus—apropos, since some of the Mob’s most important gods in its pantheon were nabbed, indicted, and jailed for life. Though the arrests didn’t change much in the Mob’s historical turf cities like Naples, the cessation of overt Mob crime in satellite cities like Turin meant Martino and his force finally had the time and resources to tackle the rest of Turin’s problems. Suddenly, it wasn’t such a good time to be a jewel thief in Turin.

Many Turinese criminals found refuge beyond Italy’s borders, taking advantage of the city’s location at the doorstep of the Alps. Anyone who needed to get lost for a while could hop in an Alfa and, with one high-speed run, be in France or Switzerland within the hour. It wasn’t so dramatic for the School of Turin; those with businesses and homes had no need to flee or go underground. They just needed to find somewhere else to employ their extracurricular skills for a while.

Finotto chose to scope out the Diamond District; he set up a front company in Antwerp called Max Diamonds in order to open an account at KBC bank. For weeks, he and a few accomplices cased the bank thoroughly, using a small hidden video camera to film its every nook and cranny. On the night of the heist, however, the thieves got no farther than outside the building before they blew it. Around 8:30 p.m. on Sunday, February 2, 1997, while trying to disarm an alarm, they accidentally set it off. Finotto and his accomplices sprinted into the night, leaving their tools behind. By the time a security unit arrived to investigate, no one was there. The only clues were the burglary tools that had been left behind and some minor damage to a door. The bank opened as usual on Monday morning.

Finotto returned to Turin to lay low, but somewhere along the criminal pipeline, an informant told the police that the burly Italian was behind the failed heist attempt. A Belgian court convicted Finotto in absentia, since the law there allowed criminal defendants to be charged, tried, and convicted without being in custody. To avoid extradition, Finotto hired lawyer Monica Muci to plead his case to the Italian appeals court. Muci convinced the judge that Finotto’s attempted bank robbery wasn’t an attempt at all, but a scouting mission that went awry. They had triggered the alarm while just looking around, she argued. What they intended to do with the knowledge they gained was immaterial, she said, and, legally speaking, a scouting mission by its very nature wasn’t an “attempt.” The Italian appeals court agreed to throw out the conviction of “attempted bank robbery,” though the Belgian court did not. As a result, Finotto was free in Italy, but risked jail in Belgium if he was ever caught there.

Though Finotto didn’t score anything on the bank job, he didn’t come away completely empty-handed. While posing as a diamond dealer, Finotto had rented an office in one building that didn’t screen its tenants as vigorously as others in the Diamond District, the Diamond Center. Although he was working on his bank job, Finotto, like any observant thief, took careful note of the Diamond Center’s security system and the general characteristics of its vault. He also sized up its take, guessing that there must be hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of diamonds stored in the underground vault at any given moment. Liquidating diamonds was harder than simply laundering the cash from a bank job, but diamonds were far more valuable by weight than cash, and they were considerably harder to trace. Luckily, he knew a jeweler in Turin who knew the particulars of the industry: Notarbartolo.

The few people Finotto entrusted with the vague outline of a plot were quickly addicted to the idea, enticed by its seeming impossibility. Their tempered experience, however, kept them from getting too swept away; they agreed to send a scout to check it out. Since it was out of the question for Finotto to wander the Diamond District as a wanted man, the obvious choice was to send the jeweler. They agreed to wait until Notarbartolo completed his initial reconnaissance before giving the plot the green light.

It was by far the biggest job the School of Turin had ever attempted. If they pulled it off, it would be the biggest heist of all time.

Chapter Three

PROBING MISSIONS

“Maybe I am a romantic lunatic who lives in his own world of dreams/fantasies, but money was the last thing on my mind. I was always waiting to reach something that was the top of its field.”

—Italian crook Valerio Viccei, after being arrested for robbing
the Knightsbridge Safe Deposit Centre in London
of $65 million in cash in 1987

If he felt like a fool carrying a man-purse, Notarbartolo could at least comfort himself knowing that it would help make him incredibly rich. The little dark-leather satchel was triangular with a flat bottom and a handle on top so that he could carry it like a doctor’s kit bag. What made it special, however, was the hole he’d cut out of the side. It was just the right size to accommodate the lens of a small video camera.

In the early months of 2001, as the School of Turin was deciding whether robbing the Diamond Center was doable, Notarbartolo traveled from Turin to Antwerp often. Cheap flights left daily from nearby Milan to Brussels. From there, Antwerp was just a short distance away. He kept the satchel in his Antwerp apartment so its obvious modification wouldn’t lead to questions from airport security.

As he approached the Diamond District, he carried the little leather purse under one arm with the camera inside rolling. He walked slowly so the recorded image wouldn’t jiggle too much.

Once at the Diamond Center, Notarbartolo badged through the turnstiles and made his way to his office on the fifth floor. Later, he took the bag into the elevator and down to the vault, filming the whole time. The resulting footage captured the elevator doors sliding open to reveal the stark white foyer before panning left to reveal the big vault door and the opening to the safe room covered by the day gate. He was keenly aware that at the same time, the Diamond Center video cameras were also filming him.

Once he was buzzed through the day gate, though, he needed only to wait until he was alone to film more openly and thoroughly. The vault was filled with riches, but also with blind spots that couldn’t be seen on any of the building’s CCTV cameras. This was to provide the tenants with privacy as they stored and removed their valuables in the safe deposit boxes, and it served Notarbartolo well. There were never any guards in the vault, so, once he was alone, he would need only to listen for the sound of the elevator door opening to know if someone was coming to open a safe deposit box. That they needed to be buzzed through the day gate gave him ample time to hide what he was doing.

Notarbartolo took his time filming the motion detector on the wall on the left side of the room, and he zoomed in to tape the details of the light detector attached to the ceiling. He panned slowly across the walls filled with the safe deposit boxes’ rectangular doors, knowing that the footage would make his colleagues in Turin salivate at the thought of what they contained.

He couldn’t do more than film the big vault door in passing, as it was in full view of the building’s security cameras, but he didn’t necessarily need to. The LIPS logo was stamped on the doorframe; knowing that and the building’s date of construction was all the information the School of Turin’s locksmiths needed to begin hunting down detailed schematics about its locks and security features.

Alone in the vault, Notarbartolo had the freedom to take a tape measure from his pocket and record the precise dimensions of the door, the tongue of the deadbolt, and the box. It was also an excellent opportunity to assess the structure of the room. Notarbartolo could tell simply by touching the walls that they were made of solid concrete. It’s not hard to cut holes in concrete given enough time and the right tools, but not without shaking the foundation of the building. Notarbartolo assumed—correctly—that the floor and the walls were laced with seismic sensors to detect attempts to tunnel into the vault.

They’d have to find another way in.

Ensuring that he filmed everything inside the Diamond Center in a way that would be instructional for the rest of the crew resulted in some awkward moments for Notarbartolo. With his little purse cocked under his arm, he was often seen on the security cameras tilting his upper body at odd angles, slowly turning in circles in the middle of hallways and walking stiffly like he had pulled a muscle. Much later, the police would watch the security tapes and laugh humorlessly at how in hindsight it was obvious that something was amiss with his behavior, but at the time, his clunky gait and what looked like spells of absentmindedness didn’t attract attention.

For Notarbartolo, the possibility of looking like an idiot was one of the risks of his job. He had a long list of images he needed to film, and he knew he couldn’t get them all at once. It would take him several trips over the course of months to film everything he needed. Each time he went back to Turin, his cohorts would have additional demands as they analyzed each new film. If they noticed a side door in one shot, they’d ask him to get a close-up of it on his next trip.

The men needed as much detail as possible about things that only a crook could be interested in. These included the type of lock on the door of the security control room; the specific makes and models of the video surveillance equipment, badge readers, and motion detectors; the manufacturer of the equipment that controlled the garage doors; and the type of lock on every door and safe between them and the diamonds. Standing around filming these things with a hidden camera was risky.

But Notarbartolo was nothing if not confident in his abilities, leading him to his most suspicious overt move to that point. During his reconnaissance, he stopped to talk to Julie Boost, wearing a slightly embarrassed expression and explaining that he had an unusual request for the building manager: he wanted a copy of the building’s blueprints.

Notarbartolo explained that he was considering upgrading to a different office in the future, maybe a bigger space that could accommodate his supposedly growing business. The blueprints, he said, would help him decide which suite of offices would be best for his plans. As risky as it was, the request was an effective probing of the building’s human defenses. Cameras and alarms are only as effective as the people monitoring them, and the Diamond Center staff had already shown themselves to be lacking by renting an office to him without bothering to check his background.

Diamond Center staff provided Notarbartolo with the requested blueprints, including those for level -2, where the vault was located. He could hardly believe his luck.

On the map, the safe room didn’t look very impressive. It wasn’t even the biggest room on the floor. There was also a workshop where staff members could make repairs to equipment, and a large storage room where unused furniture was piled among the furnaces, water heaters, and air-conditioner ducts. Each room was measured to the inch. The safe room, according to the blueprint, was twenty-seven feet wide by twenty-eight feet deep.

Getting the blueprints was the biggest testament so far to Notarbartolo’s ability to pull the wool over anyone’s eyes, even those like Boost who believed themselves to be hyperalert for scams and con artists. It didn’t take newcomers long to figure out that Julie Boost was not well liked among the diamond dealers who rented offices in the Diamond Center. Part of the reason was that she was unusually nosy.

Though Notarbartolo didn’t speak Dutch (or its local dialect of Flemish), he spoke fluent French in addition to his native Italian, and so was able to communicate easily with Boost and the other French-speaking staff members at the Diamond Center. Careful to stay under the radar by keeping his interaction with other tenants to careful nods and “bonjours,” he maintained a relative silence that belied his acutely attuned ear. Notarbartolo was on the alert for every snippet of overheard gossip and idle chatter, and from what he could glean, it seemed many found Boost often unnecessarily stern, rude, and domineering. Her boss, Marcel Grünberger, had little interest in the daily affairs of the Diamond Center, preferring instead to focus on his diamond-trading business. She was given free reign to manage the building as she saw fit, and she ruled over it like the nosy superintendent of a New York City apartment building. Given her habits, Notarbartolo must have been amazed when he thought about how well he’d snowed her.

Boost wasn’t the only one on the staff Notarbartolo came to understand. There weren’t many employees, and through a combination of overheard conversation and surreptitious observation, Notarbartolo began populating his mental map with personalities.

There were the two caretakers, referred to as concierges: Jorge Dias De Sousa and Jacques Plompteux. Although he was Portuguese, Jorge’s name was pronounced “George” by nearly everyone, and Jacques was simply “Jack.” They lived in separate apartments in the Diamond Center: Jorge, the more senior of the two, lived on the second floor of B Block. His apartment faced the vacant lots that were visible from Notarbartolo’s office; on days when Portugal played an important soccer match, Notarbartolo could have looked down and seen the Portuguese flag flying from Jorge’s second-story balcony. Jacques’ quarters were on the fourth floor of C Block. One widely circulated rumor at the Diamond Center was that Jorge and Julie Boost were romantically involved.

Jorge and Jacques alternated weeks in which they were required to live in the building, so Notarbartolo knew that there was always at least one person there around the clock. They both had master keys to the building’s entrances and internal doors and, most important, they were among only four people who knew the combination to the big vault door. The others were Boost and Grünberger.

Each weekday at 7:00 a.m., the concierge on duty took the elevator to the bottom floor, turned on the lights, and inserted a huge fairy-tale-style key into the LIPS door. The key was specially designed, something the School of Turin’s lock specialists knew the moment they learned the door’s make and model. The door was at least twelve inches thick, so the key’s pipe needed to be nearly a foot long in order to reach the lock inside. Because such a thing can’t be easily toted around in one’s pocket, the key’s stamp—the piece on the end that operated the internal tumblers—was removable. It was designed this way so that the vault keeper could leave the long pipe in a convenient location near the door while keeping the important part safely in his pocket. To open the vault door, there were two mechanisms that needed to be unlocked. The key had to be inserted and turned, and a four-number combination entered with a knob just above the keyhole. There were 100 million possible numeric combinations. The concierge then turned a wheel-shaped handle to retract the anchor bolts and the vault could then be pulled open for business.

Each weeknight at 7:00 p.m., the concierge closed the vault door and locked it by setting in place six stainless steel rods, each three inches thick, that extended from the door into the frame on the left and the right; and two more into the floor and ceiling. Then he’d flip off the lights before getting into the elevator. Until one of them opened it again, the vault remained as dark as a tomb.

Otherwise, the concierges’ responsibilities consisted of being available to open the garage door if a tenant called and needed access to the building after hours. That happened only occasionally and usually only if a tenant needed to be at the office to conduct business with someone in a different time zone. In such cases, all tenants had a laminated business card printed with Jorge’s and Jacques’ phone numbers and a schedule of who was working which week. The dates on the calendar were color-coded in black and red to make it easy to tell who was on duty.

Overall, it was a cushy assignment. Once the building was closed for the night, they had free reign of the Diamond Center and its three buildings, but they weren’t required to patrol the hallways, check that office doors were locked, or even watch the video monitors in the ground-floor control room. Most of their time was spent in their apartments watching television.

Despite the undemanding nature of the job, the men were often annoyed when they were interrupted by tenants requiring access to the building, especially considering how tempting it may have been on slow nights to sneak around the corner to the plaza for a late night beer or two. Smart tenants knew to slip the concierges a few euros for the trouble of doing their job, just so they could stay on their good sides.

Notarbartolo also became familiar with men named Andre and Kamiel, the putative daytime security guards. Andre was technically head of security, but when Notarbartolo rented his office, Andre had for six years simply performed the duties of a doorman. He spent his days in a small glass-walled security control room inside the garage, his responsibilities essentially limited to raising the arm bars for tenants with parking spaces and watching the video monitors as they badged through the doors that led from the parking deck to blocks A and B. The entry door to C Block was accessed with a key, not a badge; tenants were not supposed to use that door, so there was no camera observing it.