Flawless

by Scott Selby

  It was a lot to keep track of, and one way the men stayed organized was by fastidiously throwing away what wasn’t needed in order to reduce clutter. In the kitchen, the household trash was already bursting with everyday waste. Added to that were boxes, packaging material, receipts, shopping bags, price tags, and other material stuffed into numerous garbage bags, as if parents had been cleaning up after their children’s Christmas Day gift-opening frenzy.

  The late hours of the afternoon were for sleeping and for completing whatever personal pre-heist ritual the men might have had. History is rife with examples of strange superstitions held by criminals, from the Highland bandits of Central India who would pour a little liquor on the ground before committing a crime to appease the demons of mischief to nineteenth-century European thieves who believed the hand of a dead man was an invaluably lucky talisman. Professional British burglars were said to carry pieces of coal or chalk in their pockets for good luck, and a study of two hundred Italian murderers done in 1892 found every one of them to be a devoutly religious person who considered the practice of his faith to be a potent source of good luck. In more modern times, thieves in Turin have been known to snort cocaine before a big job to give them stamina and courage.

  For those fitfully trying to rest in Notarbartolo’s apartment, rituals probably consisted of a few quiet prayers and maybe a vaguely worded phone call to a loved one. Calls were placed on specific cell phones; each man carried two—a personal phone used to conduct legitimate business or to call his wife or girlfriend, and one used only to call the other members of the job. This closed-circuit phone network was a trademark of Italian gangs like the School of Turin. For each job, the men bought prepaid cell phones with new SIM cards and limited their calls only to each other. When the job was over, they destroyed the phones and the cards.

  Late in the evening, the men donned clothing that was dark but not sinister. They wanted to blend into the shadows without raising suspicion. They traded their treasured leather Italian loafers for soft-soled athletic shoes that wouldn’t echo on the hard tile floors. The gear was zipped into backpacks and tote bags. Along with the tools were several empty bags that they planned to have bursting with stolen treasure in a few hours’ time. They pocketed their cell phones, used the restroom, and passed small words of quiet assurance among themselves.

  They staggered their departures from the apartment, meeting up a few minutes apart from each other at one of the cars parked outside. They wouldn’t want to be spotted leaving en masse in dark clothes with a load of heavy baggage, but there was a practical reason for this as well: the building’s elevator couldn’t fit all of them at once.

  The heist went into effect just before midnight.

  Flawless

  Chapter Eight

  THE HEIST OF THE CENTURY

  Linus: Smash-and-grab job, huh?

  Rusty: Slightly more complicated than that.

  —Ocean’s Eleven (2001)

  Near midnight on Saturday, the lookout gave the all-clear. The only people walking the streets of the Diamond District were those taking a shortcut to the bars and restaurants on the plaza outside the central train station. The police were stationed inside their small kiosk at the corner of Schupstraat and Lange Herentalsestraat, but they may well have been watching the tennis match on a small portable television for all the interest they were showing the light foot traffic on the district’s streets.

  It was too risky to walk to the Diamond District with all their gear, so the thieves piled in a car and left the apartment on Charlottalei at 11:47 p.m. Detectives believe the infiltration crew consisted of at least Notarbartolo, Finotto, and D’Onorio, but they never ruled out that there was perhaps one more person they couldn’t identify.

  Pietro Tavano drove the thieves to the Diamond Center. Compared to the others, he didn’t possess any well-honed burglary skill but was instead a trusted friend and a reliable “job man,” someone who could be counted on to keep his head and hold down the fort. That was precisely the driver’s job on that night.

  The trip took about three minutes. The route followed the one Notarbartolo had taken on foot for the past two years. They must have passed the local police station with a bit of extra trepidation; they were all well aware that, if anything went wrong, they’d be in police custody before long. Someone would have been on the phone with the lookout posted somewhere within view of both the police kiosk and the Diamond Center’s garage doors. As the car, filled with burglary tools and adrenaline, approached the intersection of Schupstraat and Lange Herentalsestraat, the men snapped rubber gloves over hands that were damp with nervous perspiration.

  The garage door rolled open as the car was still cruising past the police kiosk. Because the police were stationed only a few dozen paces from the side entrance to the Diamond Center, the lookout watched to make sure that the police didn’t react to the sound of the door opening. Tavano pulled to the curb and seamlessly delivered the thieves like a special forces operation inserting soldiers behind enemy lines. They shouldered their bags and ducked under the garage door as the car pulled away. It took only a moment or two. Then, the car’s taillights turned a far corner and the garage door rolled down once again.

  Inside, the booming echo of the door faded into the recesses of the empty garage. They paused for a few moments as complete silence returned. The lookout whispered through the phone that their entry into the Diamond Center had gone unnoticed; the street outside was as quiet and sleepy as it had been before.

  Meanwhile, after dropping off his associates, Tavano drove the three-quarters of a mile back to Charlottalei 33. He parked near the apartment and went inside to monitor a police radio. If the men on the inside accidentally set off an alarm, he’d know it as soon as the police did. Tavano could then call his colleagues to give them at least a few minutes’ warning that the mission was blown and the cops were on the way.

  If that happened, the thieves would have to make an on-the-spot decision to either bolt out of the building through the garage and hope to slip through what would be a rapidly tightening noose of heavily armed law enforcement, or to flee to the fifth floor and hide in Notarbartolo’s office. Either option was a desperate move. Attempting escape through the garage would almost certainly mean running squarely into the arms of the police, while running upstairs only delayed the inevitable. The building’s security cameras would lead the police directly to office number 516. Now that they were inside the Diamond Center, there would be no escape if things went wrong.

  They didn’t linger in the garage. Of all the places in the Diamond Center, it was here that they had the greatest risk of encountering one of the concierges or some workaholic diamantaire who simply couldn’t stay away from his office, even on Valentine’s Day weekend. As it turned out, as much as two years of meticulous planning was meant to minimize every risk, blind luck was also on their side: They missed running into Jacques Plompteux by a matter of minutes. Although he was supposed to be on duty around the clock that weekend, he later admitted to the police that he’d left the building around midnight to meet his brother-in-law for drinks on the plaza.

  The thieves moved quickly to the C Block door. The time had come to use the key that they had fabricated especially for this lock. One of the thieves inserted it into the keyway and dragged it across the pins while light pressure was applied to the plug. The rest held their collective breaths. The door opened without a hitch; the custom-made key had worked flawlessly.

  Had anyone been watching the Diamond Center’s internal security cameras, they would have seen three or four shadowy figures lugging heavy bags through the darkened hallways. Fortunately for the thieves, no one watched the live feeds at night or on the weekend. The guard booths were empty, the monitors turned off.

  Notarbartolo led the others through the Diamond Center’s dark and silent corridors since he was most familiar with the building. Having long tailored his actions to the knowledge that the video cameras were watching his every move, it
was a new sensation for him to be freely walking within their sight while overtly committing a crime. The thieves made as little noise as possible as they moved swiftly to the stairwell door in the main corridor, opening it carefully to reduce the noise the latch would make in the echoey confines of the stairwell shaft. When they were all through the door, they closed it just as gently.

  At 12:14 a.m., Notarbartolo spoke to Tavano on the phone, updating him on their progress and learning that the police radio traffic gave no indication that anyone knew they were inside the building. The bottom of the stairwell outside the vault foyer was a good place to take a quick breather; there were no cameras there and the stairs reaching fifteen floors above them were silent. So far, so good.

  Like D’Onorio had done earlier that week, the men entered the dark foyer and shrouded the video camera before turning on the lights. They dropped their equipment and began unzipping bags. D’Onorio withdrew the metal plate and delicately placed it over the two magnets composing the alarm. He grasped the magnets and pulled them straight outward from where the tape anchored them to the door and the door frame. As they came off, there was the harsh sound of peeling tape, but the magnets never broke contact with each other. Just as on Monday night, the alarm was kept intact, but it now dangled from the wiring out of the way so that the vault door could be opened without sounding the alarm.

  Next, the men moved to the corner of the room to the left of the door. The ceiling was composed of thin white slats that created a false ceiling to accommodate wiring and ventilation equipment above them. They bent one of these slats to the side, presumably to remove something that may have been placed there by D’Onorio on the night of February 10. If that was the case, D’Onorio had apparently been much more careful about placing it than they were about removing it; the ceiling slats weren’t damaged until the break-in. That it was a video camera in the ceiling was the investigators’ best theory. There was nothing else above these slats that would have interested the thieves, such as alarm wiring or video cables. One theory was that the camera might have been used to record the combination dial on the vault door. This would explain the mystery of how the thieves obtained the combination.

  This theory has its detractors. The most convincing argument against it is that an outer cover encircled the combination dial and shielded the numbers from view; the concierge had to stand directly over the dial to peer down through a small window in the top of the cover to see the numbers as he entered the code; the numbers were visible only through this window. This would almost certainly have obscured the view from overhead since the concierge’s head would have been between the hidden camera and the dial.

  However, because the video camera would have been to the left rather than directly above the combination dial, it might be possible that it was angled perfectly to see the numbers. It would have been easier to achieve the right angle using a flexible fiber-optic lens no wider in diameter than one’s pinky than a standard off-the-shelf video camera.

  Thieves associated with the School of Turin have been known to use such technology. For example, during a jewelry store robbery in Turin only a few months before the Diamond Center heist, the perpetrators drilled through a safe door’s keyhole to insert a fiber-optic camera that allowed them to read the combination off the back of the lock mechanism. By connecting such a camera to a laptop computer, D’Onorio may have been able to calibrate the view precisely.

  A further problem, though, was that even if the camera had somehow been positioned so that the concierge’s head didn’t block its view of the top of the dial, the window of the dial used a distorted lens so that the numbers were only visible at a precise distance. Any camera that captured the image from a distance would be distorted beyond recognition. As Paul De Vos, the locksmith who had worked with the vault since its installation three decades before, later explained, “In my opinion, there is no way that a camera was installed somewhere to see the number combination when someone [dialed] it in. It is just impossible to see it when not holding your eye exactly in front of it.”

  Another possibility was that Notarbartolo had discovered the combination some other way and the video camera was a means of making sure that nothing had changed prior to the night of the heist. Only four people knew the combination to the door—Jorge Dias De Sousa, Jacques Plompteux, Julie Boost, and Marcel Grünberger, although Grünberger later told police he’d forgotten it. According to Detective Agim De Bruycker, one concierge (De Bruycker did not indicate which) admitted that he kept the combination written down on a piece of paper he kept in his wallet. Police also considered the possibility that Notarbartolo discovered this and obtained the combination by having someone pick the concierge’s pocket.

  Perhaps the most intriguing hypothesis—suggested by insurance investigator Denice Oliver and admitted as possible by police detectives—was that the combination was never erased from the wheel. For the combination lock to be of any use at all, the concierges should have given the wheel numerous spins to clear the code each night when the door was locked. It would only open again once the code was dialed correctly—four twists to the right, three to the left, two to the right, and one more to the left. If the door was shut and locked with the key, but the combination not erased, then it would only take the key to open it again.

  Unlike other vault doors, the Diamond Center’s LIPS door did not automatically clear the code when it was closed. Known as “auto scramble,” such a feature would have forced the concierges to enter the combination each time they opened the vault door. Pieter De Vlaam, the manager of testing and certification for LIPS, explained that “the auto-scramble function is rarely used as it requires a complicated link between the lock and the bolt work. Mechanical combination locks require disciplined use—procedures ensuring that the lock is closed; the code is frequently changed. This explains the emergence of electronic locks that can impose all of this. In other words, it is quite possible that the guards relied on the key only. A combination in that case is [as] effective as a safety belt [that is] not strapped on.”

  If the concierges did not use the combination, it would have been obvious on those occasions when Notarbartolo stayed late in the vault to observe the door-locking procedure. It also would have been another eureka moment when watching any hidden video of the vault door.

  And so, whether by high-tech means of fiber-optic espionage, low-tech means of copying the combination from someone who had carelessly written it down, or the lax habits of complacent concierges who didn’t deem it necessary to fully lock the door, the combination dial had the correct code on it when the LIPS door was opened in the early morning hours of Sunday, February 16.

  It was only then that police believe the School of Turin ran into a roadblock, albeit a minor one: a fabricated key the men hoped would unlock the storage room to the left of the vault door didn’t work. But that was the beauty of having a two-foot crowbar as backup; investigators later surmised that it was simpler for them to break the door down than to pick the lock by hand, which would have wasted precious time. The flimsy door cracked easily around the lock, the sound of splintering wood like rifle fire in the tiled foyer. The men forced the door open, sidestepping the water bottles and paint cans strewn about the storage room to apply the crowbar again to the lock box on the wall. The entire key, pipe and stamp combined, hung inside, just as Notarbartolo said it would.

  The key slid into the door, and with a few twists of the handle, the large bolts anchoring it into the doorframe retracted from their moorings. The LIPS vault door was unlocked.

  The next moments must have been ones of deep breathing and focus. One of the men likely kept his hands on the sabotaged magnetic alarm to ensure that it was out of the way of the opening door. Another had the crowbar in his hands, ready to force open the day gate. All wore headlamps, although they were turned off. With everyone in place and ready, the lights were switched off and the foyer plunged into pure darkness.

  Despite the enormous expense, the untold
man-hours, and the centuries of technological advancement intended to keep men like the School of Turin out of the vault room, the foot-thick door swung open smoothly on its hinges. A bomb couldn’t have breached that door without destroying the whole building, but they had managed to open it with a combination of patience, ingenuity, and determination. The door worked exactly as it had been designed; it was the human security surrounding it that had failed.

  For the men who had never been in the vault before, it would have been a weird sensation knowing that the treasure room lay just ahead in the darkness, maddeningly out of sight until they could ensure that its alarms were disabled.

  No one but the thieves themselves knows for sure if the darkness was total. Because of the light sensor, using flashlights or headlamps was out of the question. But they may have used a red-lens flashlight; red is at one extreme of the visible spectrum of light, the closest to infrared, which is invisible to the human eye. Having practiced with light sensors in the months leading to the heist, they might have discovered that the sensors wouldn’t detect the lower frequency of red light, or that, even if they did, the red light took longer to provoke the electrical reaction that would set off the alarm. They may also have used one or more night vision devices, expensive high-tech goggles used by hunters and soldiers to see in the dark.

  The latch on the day gate was pried loose with a loud clang, and the gate was pushed into the room. The thieves used a can of paint from the storage room to prop it open so that the pneumatic hinges couldn’t close it again. The rubber electrical tape in hand before the lights went out, one of them—Finotto would have been the obvious choice because of his height—walked to the center of the room, reached to the ceiling, and masked the light sensor with two or three overlapping strips of tape.

  They were now free to turn on the lights. As their eyes adjusted to the sudden stark assault of the fluorescent tubes, it was the first time any of the thieves besides Notarbartolo had seen the inside of the vault in person. Everything they knew of this room came from Notarbartolo’s surreptitious handheld video recordings. Now here they were, crouched on the threshold like stormtroopers prepared to assault an enemy stronghold.