Flawless: Inside the Largest Diamond Heist in History (6 page)

Notarbartolo carved out a racket for himself as a small-time hustler, a chronic and unrepentant thief who was immune to any potential rehabilitative influence of incarceration. The time he spent in jail, a few months here and there, instead provided an ideal education, as there is no better place to learn the skills of theft and burglary than in jail surrounded by thieves and burglars. As Notarbartolo’s knowledge grew, so did his confidence as a criminal.

One of the many police officers who took his mug shot back in those days caught his arrogance on film perfectly: in the picture, Notarbartolo looks like a candidate for student-body president at the local university, a cocky and handsome fellow who knows the election is already in the bag. He has a thick shock of wavy jet-black hair and his expression seems both amused and irritated at the inconvenience of being sent to jail. His left eyebrow is arched almost imperceptibly, and his lips are curled into what could either be a sneer or a smile.

While his love of fast cars never waned, in the late seventies Notarbartolo graduated into the more sophisticated realm of jewelry, specifically diamonds. More than just an intelligent career move (as jewelry is much easier to steal and sell than automobiles), it was a shift that landed him in a field in which he had a genuine interest. In particular, he had an aptitude for designing his own pieces. He was good at sketching and considered himself something of an artist; when he was bored, he could often be found doodling out ideas for necklaces, bracelets, and rings.

By the time he decided to open a jewelry store, Notarbartolo had been married for eight years to Adriana Crudo, a woman who would later be described by police as smart to the point of cunning. With curly dark hair and a slightly olive Mediterranean complexion, Crudo, who kept her maiden name in accordance with Italian tradition, looked like the actress Karen Allen from
Raiders of the Lost Ark
. As his partner in both life and business—and, as some would allege, crime—she was fiercely dedicated to her husband. After suffering through Notarbartolo’s frequent brushes with the law as an overt criminal, Crudo was happy to help him open a business that provided a veneer of respectability, a jewelry store on Corso Sebastopoli. It was a busy avenue with a popular outdoor market that operated on the weekends on its broad treelined median. It was a prime location for a retail store, not far from the Juventus football stadium and city sports complex where, decades later, Turin would host the 2006 Winter Olympics.

To the outside world, Notarbartolo had finally turned a corner and become a respectable member of society. Those who worked in the stores and cafés nearby knew him as the polite and gentlemanly neighborhood jeweler, always ready with a smile and some friendly banter about soccer. If there was anything an acquaintance could complain about, it was that Notarbartolo preferred to cheer for AC Milan over Juventus, the local heroes.

By all impressions that of an ordinary upstanding citizen, Notarbartolo’s new life was simply an outgrowth of the ultimate lesson learned in prison: the value of keeping a low profile.

When Notarbartolo and Crudo opened their first store, it was a risky time to be in the jewelry business in Turin. It had nothing to do with uncertainty in the luxury markets; it was because jewelry stores in Turin tended to get robbed on a fairly frequent basis. The rash of crimes was committed by men who were very smart, very careful, and very good at what they did. The crimes were remarkably sophisticated, not brash or brutish like a holdup or an even less graceful smash-and-grab. Instead, they took place after hours, usually in the middle of the night.

Despite precautions like alarms, sturdy locks, safe boxes, and motion detectors, the thieves cleaned their targets out, leaving few clues in their wake. Over the years, these seemingly perfect crimes netted their perpetrators an untold amount of precious stones and jewelry. In the larger stores, the value of the pilfered goods from a single heist could easily surpass a million dollars.

Here’s how it usually happened for the unlucky jeweler: On a day that he assumed would be business as usual, he would arrive at his neighborhood jewelry store, unlock the door, and shuffle inside. The store would be dark save for the blinking red lights on video cameras and alarm system control panels, just the way he remembered it when he left the previous evening. He’d flick on the recessed overhead lighting and the LED lights for the window display, shrug out of an overcoat, and start wondering how soon he could escape to the corner café for an espresso and a cigarette—but then he’d stop in his tracks as if he had been slapped.

The counters would be empty. The window display would be barren. All that was left would be the velvet pillows and mirrored panels designed to maximize the effect of diamonds, sapphires, emeralds, and rubies. He’d find cardboard wrists and necklines used to showcase solid gold bracelets, pearl necklaces, and Rolex watches standing naked in the harsh light. It’s easy to imagine any business owner in that situation immobilized for several long moments as he or she runs through the mental ticker tape of improbable explanations:
Did I enter the wrong store? Did I put everything in the safe for some reason? Am I dreaming?
Finally, the only explanation that’s even remotely plausible would bubble to the surface:
I’ve been robbed
.

The police were left as confounded as the store owners at these breakins: at first glance, there didn’t seem to be any breaking at all. Although the details varied from crime to crime, the detectives would usually find that the locks often worked perfectly, the video cameras still functioned, the alarms were still armed, and the windows were intact. And yet, the merchandise had vanished. Aside from the obvious tasks like dusting for fingerprints and questioning the staff, there was little more they could do. The thieves rarely left any evidence or at least not enough to identify suspects. But the lack of clues was a clue in itself; it pointed to a level of expertise that is rare among criminals. It’s harder to rob a jewelry store than other businesses; the whole building is sealed tight with special locks, the doors and windows are alarmed, video cameras monitor everything, and motion detectors can be calibrated to be so sensitive that they’ll signal for help if a mouse wanders in front of them. The goods are always under extra locks in their cases—which themselves have alarms—or they’re stored in bombproof safes in the back office, which of course is also locked.

In the absence of evidence, the first necessary assumption was that these were inside jobs. But that avenue never panned out. The only other possibility was that a gang of extraordinarily smart, very careful thieves was running an organized jewelry theft ring in Turin.

Because the heists were never committed using violence, intimidation, or other strong-arm tactics—and because the losses were usually mitigated by a jeweler’s insurance coverage—their investigation fell to a lower priority than most police detectives would have liked to admit. High-profile matters like Mafia-backed drug running, arms trafficking, and murder took precedence.

That’s not to say the string of burglaries was forgotten or that detectives quickly gave up trying to solve them. Law enforcement agencies around the world are skilled at investigating crimes with precious few leads, using scientific methods to gain insight into the criminals they track.

The police in Turin, however, didn’t need science to suggest where they should start looking for their jewelry thieves. It would not have taken much gumshoe work to learn that one of the most unrepentant car thieves in the city had recently gotten into the jewelry business. According to one newspaper report, Notarbartolo didn’t seem surprised by a visit from police officers curious to know how he managed to fill his store’s display cases with rings, bracelets, watches, and necklaces when just a few years before he’d written them a letter begging for his driver’s license to be reinstated so that he could get a job delivering paper for a local company. He’d come a long way, the police observed with suspicion, from scraping for low-paying jobs as a delivery boy to being his own boss at a high-end jewelry store.

In 1981, detectives searched Notarbartolo’s house looking for evidence of stolen goods in connection with a robbery the year before. They found none, but they discovered and confiscated a Beretta .22-caliber pistol with the serial number filed off. Notarbartolo said that he kept it for protection from the gang of robbers plaguing his industry. It was harder to explain the ten blasting caps for C-4, the extremely powerful plastic explosive, that the police also found.

Notarbartolo was arrested in connection with the robbery and although he was acquitted, he fell permanently in the sights of Martino’s Mobile Squad, if not as a prime suspect in the robbery spree then at least as a person of interest. His name was added to a special watch list, and, in 1987, he was given a red booklet that cops called a “preceptive document” but which criminals called a joke.

The size and shape of a passport, the document was required as part of Notarbartolo’s identification papers and could be demanded by police at routine traffic stops. Listed within the booklet was a set of rules that red-book holders had to comply with, including “do not drink,” “do not go to bars of ill fame,” and “work honestly.” In practice, it fell short of its intended effectiveness, and the red-booklet program was dropped not long after Notarbartolo was required to carry one.

Knowing that the police were actively watching him had an effect on Notarbartolo. He was careful about where he went and he made sure to arrive home well before nightfall, another red-book rule, when he’d be less likely to encounter police between Turin and his home in Trana, a rural community about forty minutes away.

Generally, he managed to stay clear of the police, with one notable exception in the autumn of 1990. In an incident that would have done nothing to convince the police that they were looking at the wrong man, Notarbartolo was questioned after he was caught following a diamond sales representative through the streets of Turin.

Although the practice has since faded away, at the time it wasn’t unusual for diamond salesmen to make door-to-door sales calls to retailers. Notarbartolo employed one of these fellows himself. It was a dangerous assignment, to say the least, because they toted with them bags crammed full of diamonds and jewels. Unlike the merchants in the Diamond District in Antwerp, though, they didn’t secure them with flashy handcuffs and chains. The logic was that such a precaution would only draw attention to the fact that there was something valuable enough inside the case to justify a chain. The men who took these assignments dressed down for the occasion, sometimes in jeans and T-shirts, with the goods in a rucksack, just for the sake of looking unworthy of a robbery attempt.

But in September 1990, whatever measures at subtlety this particular salesman had employed hadn’t fooled Notarbartolo. Trained to recognize when he was being followed, the salesman noticed a metallic blue sports car—an Alfa Romeo—on his tail. He pulled over and parked, strolled to a phone booth, and called the emergency police number. He played it cool enough that Notarbartolo wasn’t spooked into leaving. Though the event was noted in his record, Notarbartolo was able to charm his way out of this compromising situation once the police arrived.

Run-ins with the police were the exceptions, however, not the rule. While Crudo ran the chain of stores that eventually included three locations, Notarbartolo was usually far from the eyes and ears of the police, sometimes in the nearby city of Valenza, which had a thriving jewelry manufacturing and design industry. Just as frequently, Notarbartolo spent his time in smoke-filled cafés and taverns throughout Turin.

These places were in out-of-the-way locales, far from the downtown tourist traps and the main boulevards that could have been easily observed by curious cops. One of the hangouts Notarbartolo used to frequent was at the intersection of a few narrow residential streets lorded over by towering apartment blocks. The sidewalks were cracked and weedy and filled with older men nursing espresso at cheap plastic patio tables. Inside, the walls were old and worn, the wood paneling warping from the fumes of millions of cigarettes over the years. Men sipped thimbles of brandy while killing time waiting to see who came through the doors. Places like this were undoubtedly shady, but Notarbartolo made sure they were free of at least overt criminal activity that would threaten to attract the attention of the police. If standards slipped to the degree that the place became a magnet for drug addicts or hookers, he’d find another espresso joint. There was little point in pressing his luck out of loyalty to a bar stool; drug trafficking and other Mob activities were high on the list of crimes the police were resolved to abolish.

These places were important to Notarbartolo, but not for social reasons. In fact, he had a notorious hatred of smoke, and it must have been intolerable for him to sit amid the cigarette exhaust. But it was in the smoky back rooms of cafés like this that he conducted his off-the-books business. Though gambling in such places was illegal, it took place behind doors that were labeled “private,” over velvet-topped tables scarred with cigarette burns. Those playing cards were always men; if there was a woman, she was bringing the drinks and emptying the ashtrays. Strangers stumbling through looking for the bathroom were sized up from every corner of the room; it was clear from the noticeable lull in the conversation that they weren’t welcome to stay and play a few hands.