Flawless

by Scott Selby

  The only way many insurance companies would do business with diamond dealers that had offices in the Diamond Center was if they fortified their own property, or if they agreed to store only small portions of their stock in the vault.

  A good example was longtime diamond insider Fay Vidal’s employer, IDH Diamonds, which occupied the entire third floor of B Block. When you stepped off the elevators, it was easy to forget you were in the Diamond Center. Unlike the grim, prison-like corridor of the fifth floor, where Notarbartolo’s office was located, the third floor was redone entirely in blond wood and bright tile. Visitors entered a small foyer where they pressed an intercom button next to IDH’s main entrance to get further.

  Cameras watched the door, and a receptionist buzzed visitors into a small area that was called a “rat trap” in security parlance. There was another camera in this entryway and yet another door that had to be buzzed open to get to the inner sanctum. Inside, the open area was expensively adorned in wood with marble countertops, fresh flowers, modern artwork, and abundant recessed lighting. Glass-walled offices looked out onto the central area. Video cameras were subdued but still obvious, even in the corner conference room. It was a safe assumption that the offices were wired from top to bottom with alarms.

  IDH dealt exclusively in rough uncut diamonds, and moved them in and out of Antwerp in great volume. The company bought rough from major producers throughout the world and distributed them to smaller manufacturing companies, actively doing business with some three hundred firms. On hand at any given time were millions of dollars of uncut stones, which were sorted by size and color and kept in large resealable plastic bags, which in turn were kept in several safes, one of which was the size of a kitchen refrigerator.

  Though it may have looked like a graphic design firm, the company was a fortress; its security top-notch. None of its vast wealth was kept in the Diamond Center’s vault; the underground safe deposit boxes IDH rented were used to store documents and business records, not diamonds, cash, or jewelry.

  The Diamond Center was considered “unacceptable” by Oliver’s standards, owing to the fact that she hadn’t been allowed to inspect it, but that didn’t mean it was impossible for businesses located there to get insurance. Some insurance companies were strict about not insuring diamonds kept in the vault, but others were happy to do so for a higher premium or by offering only limited coverage. Of course such insurance was optional, and there were many companies with offices in the Diamond Center that felt it was unnecessary. The vault, in their view, was insurance enough against theft.

  After every trip to Antwerp, Notarbartolo returned to Italy smarter and more confident than when he left. As eager as he was to debrief his colleagues, he was just as eager to simply surround himself again with the comforts of his home. Living undercover in Antwerp left a lot to be desired. As his friend Antonino Falleti said later, “Belgium is great for beer, but not for anything else.”

  For Notarbartolo, as for many Italians, food was among life’s top priorities, especially after the relatively bland fare on offer in Antwerp. There was an Italian restaurant on the plaza near the train station, but it was a garish mockery of Italian restaurants, all red-and-white-checkered awnings and tablecloths, with a plaster statue of an Italian chef greeting patrons at the door.

  For a man whose pleasures were among the simplest—good food and the company of family and friends—Notarbartolo’s home in the Alpine foothills town of Trana was a sanctuary that was nothing like the depressing apartment he rented in Antwerp. Located between Turin and the French border, Trana shamed any Belgian village purporting to be “quaint.” Huddles of red-tile-roofed homes settled in the dells of towering hills like water in the recesses of rocky ground. The highest structure in Trana, as in the villages around it, was the church, and the town reached toward the Piedmont forests with fields of corn, grapes, cattle, and horses.

  Notarbartolo’s house was nearly hidden in a small maze of rural dwellings situated on a modest hump of rolling hills. It was off the main road leading away from Trana toward the larger town of Giaveno, past haystacks carefully covered with tarps to protect against snow and rain, brick barns crumbling just so, and neighbors in rubber boots and wool sweaters burning leaves in their fields. Although his direct neighbors had horses and goats, Notarbartolo’s property was more country estate than country ranch. It wasn’t lavish, but it was more than modest. It befitted his image as a city jeweler who preferred the peace and quiet of the countryside.

  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 tapere
d 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.

  Flawless

  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 har
d 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.