by Scott Selby
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.
As with smoking, Notarba
rtolo 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. Hi
s 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.