by Scott Selby
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.
Flawless
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 man
ager: 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.
Kamiel was arguably the busiest of the four guards. He sat in the security booth at the main entrance on Schupstraat watching the video monitors and the foot traffic swarming in and out of the Diamond Center during business hours. He checked visitors’ IDs and issued temporary passes, phoning the receptionists in the diamond businesses upstairs to confirm that strangers had legitimate appointments. It was his job to buzz open the fenced day gate to the safe room when tenants wanted access to their safe deposit boxes. At the end of the day, he rewound the videotapes that recorded all the images from the video monitors, labeled them with the date, and put fresh tapes in the VCRs.
Neither Andre nor Kamiel patrolled the halls. According to an account of their later statements to police, they relied purely on technology for the building’s security. Ironically, although he controlled access to the vault for more than one hundred tenants who stored invaluable wealth in their sa
fe deposit boxes, Kamiel had never even gone to the bottom level of the Diamond Center. All he knew of the vault was what the video monitors showed him.
The picture that took shape in Notarbartolo’s mind was one of a staff that had grown dangerously complacent. The Diamond Center had never been robbed, and, based on what he could discern about the staff’s habits, no one expected it to be. They trusted the security of the Diamond District in which the building was located to deter most clear-thinking thieves, and they were certain that the impressive vault with its bombproof door would keep out anyone foolhardy enough to try anything.
Sitting alone in his office, Notarbartolo assembled something of a multimedia treasure map. The videotapes, the blueprints, and the reams of sketches he drew in the long hours spent sequestered in his office pretending to trade diamonds were equal parts informative and tantalizing. Through them, the School of Turin could easily imagine following this treasure map to riches.
Notarbartolo’s reconnaissance proved to the School of Turin that it had picked the right building to knock over. The staff’s lax approach to security stood in stark contrast to the other main diamond office buildings in the district, the four bourses. It was highly unlikely that Notarbartolo would even have gotten into the trading hall of a bourse to see for himself just how soft a target the Diamond Center was in comparison.
On any given weekday, the tables in the main trading hall at the Beurs voor Diamanthandel, which was founded in 1904, could be found scattered with coffee cups, crumpled napkins, mobile phones, day planners, and gemstone loupes. What a visitor noticed, however, wasn’t the cafeteria-style trappings, but the diamonds blinking like white Christmas lights in the sunlight cascading from the room’s twenty-five-foot windows. The loose diamonds were laid out on small white velvet pads or in little tissue-paper packages known as diamond papers unfolded into the shape of a paper box. They were handed around casually like someone passing the salt; when they were poured into metal measuring cups at the electronic scale on each table, they sounded like marbles being poured into a skillet.