Flawless: Inside the Largest Diamond Heist in History (10 page)

The square one-acre property was fronted by a knee-high stone wall facing the narrow road, topped with a four-foot wrought iron fence interlaced with shrubbery and rosebushes. Eight-foot hedges separated his property from that of his neighbors, providing an impenetrable privacy screen. A more workaday fence defined the back border; beyond it, lush forest fell down a long slope, opening the view to a stunning valley scene that looked several miles across farmland dotted with brick homes and, in the winter, their curling gunmetal columns of chimney smoke. The wide back patio, perfect for sipping wine, completed the estate’s mini-villa appeal.

In the backyard was another small structure, Notarbartolo’s workshop. As much as his life as a jewelry store owner served as cover for his criminal activities, the irony was that he very much enjoyed the craftsmanship of making jewelry. Stealing necklaces, rings, and watches made him rich, but he hoped that designing them would one day make him famous. Amid the maps, diagrams, and to-do lists that occupied his lonely days sequestered in the office at the Diamond Center were sketches of wedding bands, pendants, and earrings, many undoubtedly inspired by pieces he saw during his forays past the retail stores on Pelikaanstraat. It’s not hard to imagine him retiring to the workshop with a glass of wine—he preferred the local vintages, Barolos and Barberas—to tinker with the tools of a trade that, for him, was more than just a façade.

But before long, it was time to get down to business. He became less Harry Winston and more James Bond. When he called Tavano, Finotto, and the others, he switched his personal SIM card in his mobile phone—the one with the phone number he assumed was known by the police—for a different one with an anonymous prepaid Belgian phone number that couldn’t be traced back to him. No one who was in on the crime ever called the others except on these secret numbers that couldn’t be traced. The gang was then summoned to a meeting.

Even today, the police don’t know exactly where the School of Turin plotted its operation. Because Personal Chiavi, Nello Fontanella’s locksmith shop, was wiretapped and videotaped, they know it wasn’t there. Police believe the most likely spot for such a meeting was at Notarbartolo’s house. It was comfortable—the billiard table downstairs would be the perfect place to spread out documents—and it was remote. There was plenty of room inside the driveway gate to accommodate three or four vehicles. Nosy neighbors wondering about the visitors could easily assume they were there to watch a soccer game on television. The house was not under police surveillance. The School of Turin had free reign at Notarbartolo’s villa as the plot took shape.

Generally speaking, there were two ways to rob a place like the Diamond Center: the gangsters could come roaring in with guns blazing, hoping to overwhelm the guards in a blitzkrieg of terror, or they could try tiptoeing through the security network like phantoms to make off with the loot behind everyone’s back. On first glance, both approaches had their challenges, but the strong-arm strategy was ruled out immediately. The School of Turin operated according to a strict code: no violence. Any thug could stick a gun in someone’s face and make off with his money and diamonds, but crooks like that were at the bottom of the food chain. Stickups were the crudest form of thievery, requiring nothing but guts or the right level of desperation.

That’s not to say strong-arm tactics didn’t work. The biggest benefit to barging in and demanding money was that it required minimal preparation and it was usually over very quickly. The thieves could be in and out, hopefully vastly enriched, before the adrenaline had tapered off. One such robbery resulted in what was, at the time the Turin gang was gathering its intelligence on the Diamond Center, the largest diamond heist thus far. Bandits firing machine guns stormed the Carlton Hotel jewelry store in Cannes, France, on August 11, 1994, just before closing time. They pocketed the loot and were gone before anyone realized they were shooting blanks. Brutish, yes, but it was also highly effective. In just minutes, they were gone with an estimated $45 million in jewelry.

An even more dramatic robbery had taken place seven years before the Carlton Hotel heist. In that case, flamboyant Italian criminal Valerio Viccei—who like Notarbartolo had a weakness for fast cars and flashy clothes—had led a group of accomplices into the Knightsbridge Safe Deposit Centre in London and held up the staff at gunpoint. They flipped the sign on the front door to read “closed,” emptied the safe deposit boxes of an estimated $65 million in cash and gems, and then just walked away. The police found one of Viccei’s fingerprints in the Safe Deposit Centre and arrested him and everyone involved a month later. Viccei was convicted and sentenced to twenty-two years.

The Turin gang undoubtedly knew of Viccei—he was Italian, after all—but they probably considered themselves more closely aligned with Albert Spaggiari, known for spending Bastille Day weekend in 1976 pillaging four hundred safe deposit boxes inside the Société Générale bank in Nice. Spaggiari, a Frenchman, was a legend to sophisticated criminals everywhere.

After renting a safe deposit box at the bank, Spaggiari and a team of trusted accomplices had spent two months burrowing a tunnel from the city sewer system into the vault. The sewer was big enough to drive a Land Rover inside; the thieves filled the truck with excavated dirt that was then dumped miles away.

Before committing to this arduous task, Spaggiari had put a loud alarm clock in his safe and timed it to go off in the middle of the night. He wanted to see if the vault was protected with acoustic or seismic alarms that would detect the noise and vibration of their work. It turned out that the vault had no alarms at all because the bank owners considered it to be utterly impregnable.

Once Spaggiari’s men tunneled up into the vault, they welded the vault door shut from the inside and held a looting party, complete with wine and pâté, as they raided the safe deposit boxes. In some of the boxes of prominent citizens, they discovered compromising photos. As an extra touch, the thieves taped the photos to the wall for all to see, and then escaped with $18 million worth of cash, jewels, and precious metal. They left behind a note with a sentiment that the School of Turin would have admired.
Sans armes, sans haine, et sans violence,
it read. “Without guns, without hatred, and without violence.”

The police eventually caught Spaggiari, but even that part of the tale was stamped with his special flair: he escaped from custody during a hearing by jumping out a third-story courthouse window and taking off on a motorcycle. Legend has it that he mailed a check for the equivalent of six hundred dollars to the owner of the car he damaged when he landed on it. He was never recaptured and was rumored to have died in Italy’s Piedmont, where the School of Turin planned the ultimate heist two and a half decades later. Certainly, it was one Spaggiari would have admired.

Even if they didn’t consider a holdup as being beneath them, there were practical reasons the School of Turin rejected the direct approach of an armed robbery. Storming the building was simply out of the question. Notarbartolo didn’t need to be operational in Antwerp long before taking stock of the overwhelming arsenal at the hands of the Belgian police and the private security guards who roamed the district’s streets. Some carried Belgian-made FN P90 submachine guns and wore body armor.

Between his apartment and the Diamond District, Notarbartolo walked past a full-service police station every day, counting as many as a dozen cop cars out front at times. At most, it would take four or five minutes before as many as fifty heavily armed cops dropped into the Diamond District like paratroopers. The vehicle barricades meant raiders would have to arrive and depart on foot. Without question, there would be a bloody shootout with very little hope of leaving with anything of value; it would simply take too long to get down to the vault and open enough safe deposit boxes to make it worthwhile. A plan like that also assumed they could figure out how to get into the safe deposit boxes quickly, a problem they hadn’t even begun to address.

Notarbartolo and his accomplices could kidnap someone and force him to open his or her box—or, just as effective, kidnap someone’s wife or children—but whom would they target? There was simply no way to tell which boxes held enough treasure to justify such means. Boxes that Notarbartolo spied filled with jewelry one day might be empty the next. If they kidnapped a relative of one of the staff to get keys, codes, and combinations, they risked the police finding out, a hostage escaping, or getting hurt. Plus, when one resorts to violence, the penalty for failure steepens acutely. The School of Turin knew if they were not killed in the commission of the crime, they could go to prison for a very long time.

No, the Turin gangsters agreed, stealth was the only acceptable route. As much as they wanted to successfully steal as much as they could carry, as Spaggiari had done, they wanted to do it with some élan. The School of Turin had never tried a job this big before. Most of their previous heists targeted retailers, minor league compared to what they were plotting now. But as far as the thieves were concerned, there was no such thing as an impregnable vault.

However, creeping through the shadows and robbing the place in secret had obvious risks, including silent hidden alarms, a night watchman with insomnia, or trigger-happy cops who might mistake a crowbar for a shotgun in the dark of night. Missing one small detail would spell their doom.

Minimizing those risks was the entire point of their extensive preparation. The satisfaction of penetrating what was supposedly impenetrable would make spending the millions they hoped to steal all the more enjoyable.

Chapter Four

WHERE THE DIAMONDS ARE

“What do I know about diamonds? Don’t they come from Antwerp?”

—
Snatch
(2000)

Word of the heist spread like a brush fire. From one end of the Diamond District to the other, the news on every pair of lips was that thieves had robbed one of its fortresses. The warbling of police radios and the high-frequency shrill of sirens added to the sense of disaster in the district. Panic struck in the streets of Antwerp with traders wondering if their safe deposit box had been emptied or if any of the stones they had lent a fellow trader had been stolen.

It was a Thursday morning in December 1994, and the target had been the Antwerpsche Diamantkring, one of the four bourses. One of its members had gone to the vault and discovered his safe deposit box had been emptied. It took uniformed police officers about thirty minutes to cordon off the entrance and get control of an increasingly desperate crowd of diamantaires and bourse members who were churning the few details they knew into a thick butter of gossip and innuendo.

The police were clueless. It was a clean heist and they considered it fortunate that the thieves had raided only five of the bourse’s 1,500 safe deposit boxes. Because it was such a well-done job, the initial suspicion was that an insider was involved. The first step of the investigation was to look carefully at the employees, and then turn to the tenants who had access to the vault. With so many people to interview, it was going to be a long process.

Meanwhile, as insurance investigator Denice Oliver tells the story, two Orthodox diamond dealers were having their own crisis in the midst of it all. They hadn’t lost anything in the robbery. It was just the opposite: they had much of the loot. They were in on the plot with an Israeli named Amos Aviv who had rented an office in the bourse. Aviv had spent eighteen months casing the building and its vault while acting as a diamond dealer and recruiting the help of one of the security guards. With the guard’s assistance, Aviv was able to make impressions of the safe keys, which is usually done by pressing the key into a block of modeling clay. It’s not hard for a locksmith to create a key from the cast. Aviv and two others opened the safes and immediately handed over the cache of diamonds to the two religious men, who were simply supposed to hold onto it until the heat died down.

Aviv and his associates may well have gotten away with the heist if these diamonds hadn’t seared a hole in the men’s consciences. They were distraught, simultaneously riddled with guilt for their complicity in ripping off fellow diamond dealers and terrified of being arrested if they confessed. They eventually decided to tell a rabbi everything and ask for his help and guidance.

The rabbi was stunned by what his followers had done but heartened that the men had done the right thing by confessing. He absolved them of wrongdoing, forgave them their sins, and volunteered to take the diamonds to the police. The rabbi took the cardboard box filled with 10.3 pounds of diamonds worth $4.7 million, strapped it onto his bicycle with bungee cords, and pedaled to the downtown police department where the investigation into the heist was being run.

The officers took one look at the rabbi, shabby and red-faced after biking through the winter weather, clutching a ragged box, and decided that whatever his complaint, it was less important than the diamond crime they were investigating at the moment. He was told to take a seat.

It was only hours later, when it became clear that he was resolved to stay until he could speak to an investigator, that the rabbi was interviewed. He opened the box and poured out the contents on a desk to the amazement of the officers. In addition to the rough and polished diamonds, there was the equivalent of half a million dollars in fifteen different kinds of currency. The loot they’d been looking for had been sitting in the waiting room all along.

The story didn’t end as the rabbi had hoped. The detectives were not so accepting of the accomplices’ change of heart, and they were entirely unmoved by the rabbi’s insistence that the matter was closed because the men had repented and he had forgiven them. He was browbeaten and interrogated for hours more, as police tried to extract the names of the accomplices from him. “The rabbi was about to get his nails pulled out,” as Oliver put it. Finally, he identified the men. They were arrested and eventually confessed to everything. Aviv and his accomplices were also arrested.

That situation was played as a huge win for the police despite that the crime was solved only because two of the perpetrators had a crisis of conscience. In the halls of justice, that didn’t matter because heists don’t usually end so cleanly, with the loot recovered and the perpetrators jailed. The police were happy to take their victories where they could.

Tales of such criminal derring-do flowed like water through the offices on the fourteenth floor of the federal police building located on the outskirts of Antwerp. Home to a special unit of federal detectives who investigated only crimes involving diamonds, its shelves were filled with books about diamonds and its walls with mug shots of men who were wanted for stealing them.

In the office shared by unit commander Agim De Bruycker and detective Patrick Peys, one wall was filled with Polaroid snapshots of the unit’s men conducting investigations in various cities around the globe, from the seedy to the ritzy. These six “diamond detectives,” as they were known, traveled to the corners of the earth following the trails of Lebanese financiers, Israeli rip-off artists, and Belgian middlemen working for Al Qaeda cells. They ran down diamantaires who smuggled goods in and out of the country to avoid taxes. They investigated allegations of money laundering and trafficking in conflict goods used to finance African wars. Because diamonds are used to pay spies, gunrunners, and soldiers of fortune, the detectives also functioned as a de facto organized crime and counterterrorism squad, and they worked closely with the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation, Europol, Interpol, and the International Criminal Court. Both De Bruycker and Peys looked the part, although from different genres—De Bruycker had a passing resemblance to Patrick Swayze and looked like an action hero; Peys, with his thick salt-and-pepper hair and walrus mustache, looked like Peter Sellers’s famous
Pink Panther
detective Jacques Clouseau.

Despite the prestige of their jobs, the men felt underappreciated—and often openly resented—particularly in the narrow confines of the Diamond Square Mile. While the detectives were the first ones diamantaires turned to in the event of a theft, they were also often the last ones the diamantaires wanted to see at any other time. The diamond industry was tightly insulated and highly protective of its reputation. From the industry’s point of view, the diamond detectives were tolerated because they were necessary to investigate crimes
against
it, but whenever they made headlines by looking into crimes
within
it, they were a threat to the reputation of the whole industry.

The diamond industry had already withstood some sizable blows to its reputation. In 2000, news of conflict or blood diamonds made buyers aware of the very real connections between diamonds and war. Industry titan De Beers quit buying diamonds on the open market in order to quell criticism that it was funding wars in Africa, particularly in Sierra Leone, Angola, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. As of 2000, the diamonds De Beers sold were certified by the company to be conflict free. It vowed that, in the future, its cache of rough goods would come only from mines it controlled or from companies or governments it partnered with.

As if that weren’t bad enough, a
Washington Post
investigation in late 2001 tied Sierra Leonean rebels to Al Qaeda, which was buying diamonds from the African guerillas in preparation for its September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States. Osama bin Laden’s group needed a major cache of highly liquid assets, since it anticipated one of the first responses from the United States and its allies would be a freeze on its international bank accounts. According to the
Post
, the scheme worked, and Al Qaeda had in its possession tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of diamonds that could be easily converted to cash as it launched its attacks.

For the diamond industry, this was a nightmare. There could be no worse possible association for the products it sold than Al Qaeda. The diamond industry wanted to distance itself as much as possible from any ties its products might have with terrorism, but, unfortunately for Antwerp, two of the men alleged to have acted as middlemen for the Al Qaeda diamond transactions were found right in the middle of the Diamond District.

When the
Post
story broke, the diamond detectives asked Belgium’s major banks to scour their records for unusual transactions. Artesia Bank noticed that one company had done very little business in the late 1990s, and then suddenly turned over $14 million in 2000 and more than $1 billion in the portion of 2001 preceding the September 11 attacks. The company had then stopped recording diamond sales in Antwerp—the opposite of what would be expected with such a sudden surge of money through its account. The ensuing investigation linked the company to Lebanese diamond dealer Aziz Nassour and his cousin Samih Osailly. Osailly and Nassour were convicted of dealing with conflict diamonds and belonging to a criminal organization and were sentenced to three and six years, respectively.

Since Antwerp had a policy of zero tolerance for trafficking in blood diamonds, there was nothing to do but grit its teeth that one of its own businesses was involved in it and assure anyone who asked that it was an isolated incident.

To be sure, there’s no evidence that most of Antwerp’s 1,500 diamond businesses were anything but perfectly aboveboard. But just as in any industry, there were those for whom that definition was flexible. It’s not unlikely that a diamantaire who considered himself to be perfectly scrupulous still had a stash of “black diamonds”—diamonds bought and sold off the books, on the black market—hidden in a safe somewhere. This was sometimes done to avoid value-added taxes or sometimes because a diamond’s pedigree wouldn’t survive close scrutiny. Maybe they had been stolen or maybe they’d been smuggled. Regardless, trading in black diamonds was hardly uncommon; it was a means of padding the bottom line. It’s not unlike claiming the maximum amount of charitable donations on one’s tax return up to the point at which the IRS requires proof: if the value of the donations is inflated, while it’s still illegal, the penalties are minute, and it’s almost impossible to get caught.

If a diamantaire were to be caught trading in black diamonds, however, it would be the diamond detectives who would catch him. That’s why, unless they’re the victims of a theft, few diamond merchants would welcome a call from the fourteenth floor of the federal police building. Even if they were the victims of a crime, some would rather say nothing than open their books to these detectives. Peys summed it up even more succinctly when he said, “Some of them wish we’d all drop dead.”

Be that as it may, there’s little question that the diamond industry requires policing both internally and externally. As a form of currency, diamonds have no equal. They are untraceable, are easily concealed, and retain their value anywhere on the globe. It’s well known by law enforcement and thieves alike that you cannot trace a diamond backward. Serial numbers inscribed by lasers can also be removed with lasers. Certificates detailing cut and weight are rendered meaningless if a stone is recut to shave off a tenth of a carat. A thief can simply submit the altered stone for grading and get a new certificate. These are among the reasons thieves have plotted to steal diamonds since practically the moment that humans decided they were valuable.

Diamonds are precious for both the characteristics nature has bestowed upon them and the mystique humans have attributed to them. They are the hardest substance found in nature, formed over the course of almost a billion years to 4.25 billion years deep beneath the earth’s surface in what geologists call the “diamond stability field.” At that dark and violent subterranean level, about 90 to 120 miles deep, the extreme pressure and heat of the upper mantle combine in the correct proportions to fuse carbon molecules together in the strongest elemental combination possible.

Other carbon materials aren’t nearly as strong. For example, graphite has strong carbon bonds in layers, but these layers have very weak connections between each other. That’s why graphite transfers so easily to a sheet of paper from the tip of a pencil. But the carbon in diamonds is linked in a three-dimensional structure, with each atom bonded in the strongest way possible. As a result, they have a unique octahedral crystalline structure. The bonds between the atoms of a diamond can only be broken by another diamond. That’s why diamond polishers use saws and grinders dusted with diamond powder to cut and shape rough diamonds.