Flawless

by Scott Selby

  But after several hours of looting, they had a true embarrassment of riches on their hands: they’d stolen more than they could carry. They only wanted to make one trip out of the building in order to minimize their exposure and they wanted to do it while it was still early. And there was so much worth stealing that, in the end, they had to make tough decisions; should they take the crowbar or leave it behind so they could steal another brick of gold?

  The bags were zipped closed and arranged at the door to the stairwell. They took a last look around at their handiwork, surely with a tinge of regret at the millions of dollars’ worth of gems and jewels scattered on the floor that they simply couldn’t take with them. Then they called their friends on the outside to tell them they were coming out.

  At the Charlottalei apartment, Tavano put on his coat, grabbed the car keys, and took the elevator to the ground floor. The lookout on the street near the Diamond District reported that the coast was clear. The thieves had the go-ahead to vacate the vault. They didn’t even attempt to cover their tracks; they left the doors wide open and the lights on. There was no point wasting time trying to disguise the crime since it was going to be apparent to the first person who came down to the vault Monday morning.

  The thieves retraced their steps as carefully and quietly as they could with the loads they carried. The bag of diamonds alone weighed at least forty-four pounds, as much as a microwave oven. On the way to the garage, one of the men ducked off toward the Schupstraat entrance and, using another fabricated key, opened the door to the security control room. He ejected the tapes that had recorded their crime from the two VCRs, placing them in his backpack, and replaced them with blanks. He looked through the archive of the previous month’s tapes and stole the four tapes that had recorded the happenings of February 10, the day D’Onorio snuck into the building and sabotaged the magnetic alarm. They were not hard to find as the tapes were labeled by date and organized accordingly. He exited the control room quickly, locked the door behind him, and rejoined the others.

  The final task was a coordinated, smooth withdrawal from the Diamond Center. Again, the thieves were on the phone with both Tavano and the lookout. As the car pulled to the curb, the lookout gave the green light and they opened the garage door. After the sweaty work in the vault, the predawn winter air was bitingly cold as the men swiftly left the building. The car sagged on its springs as heavy bags of stolen diamonds, cash, gold, and jewels were dumped in the trunk, no more than fifty feet from where police officers pulling the graveyard shift sat bundled in heavy coats in the police kiosk around the corner on Schupstraat.

  The thieves piled into the car and disappeared down the street.

  The temptation to shout in exhilaration must have been overwhelming. But considering that it was dawn on a Sunday, they wisely refrained from waking Notarbartolo’s neighbors. Exhaustion was creeping in, but it couldn’t overcome the powerful, otherworldly high that made them lightheaded. The thrill of having gotten away with the heist of the century was better than falling in love. It was better than every holiday and birthday they’d ever had.

  The men beamed at each other, the intense focus of the past several hours bleeding off into a faint awe that they had pulled it off. They wasted little time pouring the king’s ransom of treasure onto the large, reddish rug in the middle of the floor to tally their ill-gotten gains and divide the loot into parcels that would be taken separately back to Italy. No one seemed to mind this part of the job.

  Like the winners in a game of Monopoly, they sorted and counted stacks of multicolored cash. Most of it was American currency, because diamond prices are set to the U.S. dollar throughout the world. There were also euros, Swiss francs, British pounds, Indian rupees, Australian dollars, outdated Belgian francs, and Israeli new sheqalim. They decided that they should throw away the more obscure currencies that would be hard to redeem without risking questions. The rupees were tossed into a large garbage bag that was already being filled with the equipment from the job, including the dismantled pulling tool that had served them so well, the alligator clips they used to test the wires in the ceiling, rolls of duct tape, and other material that could tie them to the heist.

  They sorted the government bonds and stock certificates which came from around the world, most from Belgium but a few from as far away as Israel. The watches took up a lot of space because most were stolen with their original packages so as to make them easier to sell. The diamond earrings were piled so high they looked like a glittering snowdrift on the rug. The men passed jewelry back and forth to one another, admiring the settings in a ring or studying the emeralds, rubies, and sapphires in the bracelets and necklaces.

  What surely entranced them the most, however, was the staggering cache of diamonds they’d stolen, so many that their weight strained the seams of the bag. They were poured carefully onto the rug. There were thousands of rough and polished diamonds—many of the latter were in their blister packs while others were wrapped in diamond papers. The men hadn’t taken the time in the vault to open these paper packages, so they peeled apart the folds on the living room floor to discover what they contained. Some had great stones, which were added to the pile of diamonds on the carpet.

  Others contained comparatively worthless pebbles, such as a package that was filled with hundreds of emerald pointers, tiny green rocks in a marquise shape that were four or five hundredths of a carat. Static caused them to pop off the surface of the inner layer when the package was opened and a few jumped onto the rug; this was a common problem with tiny stones and merchants often took special care when opening such packages of pointers.

  The members of the School of Turin weren’t as delicate. They didn’t even notice the little emerald stones that were quickly lost in the fibers of the rug. All they cared about was that the package’s contents were worthless compared to the other items they’d stolen. The paper was crumpled up—pointers and all—and tossed in one of the trash bags. “Even though this little collection of emeralds still had some value,” as Peys later explained, “at that moment, in comparison to what else they had, it was rubbish. It’s like having an envelope with tens of thousands of dollars and one with small coins.”

  It took a few hours to account for all that they’d stolen and to repack it into several bags that would be divided for the trip back to Italy. Notarbartolo marveled at everything they had to take from the apartment. Not only were there several bags of priceless loot, but he’d packed most of his personal belongings as well. He made himself a sandwich from the bread and salami left over from Finotto’s shopping trip, ate all but a few bites of his sandwich and threw the rest in the kitchen trash can.

  They faced a long drive back to Italy; Notarbartolo was going southwest through France, while other thieves were heading east through Germany, and some toward Brussels and the airport. Since no one in Antwerp knew where Notarbartolo lived (his apartment wasn’t listed on his lease at the Diamond Center and he paid his rent in cash), they could have rested for a bit before heading out.

  When they were ready to go, the little elevator in the Charlottalei apartment building made numerous trips to and from the seventh floor that day as the men emptied the apartment of anything related to the heist and loaded it into their cars. Transporting the luggage to the cars was no problem, but it looked a little suspicious when they began filling one of the cars with teeming garbage bags.

  The heist had produced a lot of waste. They threw away the tools and equipment along with the loot they didn’t want to take with them, including diamonds that they deemed not worth trying to sell, the emerald pointers, and the obscure currencies. They also threw their rubber gloves and the stolen security tapes (all of them dismantled with their tape unspooled) into garbage bags to be brought to the cars.

  As an afterthought, on the way out the door, someone also grabbed the household garbage in the kitchen trash can. They had reused the bag from Finotto’s trip to the Delhaize supermarket, still containing the receipt, as a trash b
ag. He stuffed that bag, a white plastic shopping bag emblazoned with the Delhaize logo, a black and red design featuring the stylized image of a lion, into one of the larger bags. In all, there were four large black plastic bags that filled the trunk and back seat of one of the cars.

  They said their farewells without a hint of mistrust that one of them would be tempted to vanish before they could properly divide the loot, a task they would do Monday in a location far removed from their usual haunts around Turin. In a movie, this would be the point where a conniving double-cross would occur, but many of these men knew each other from childhood. They knew each other’s wives and children. And as much as they were thieves, they considered themselves men of honor. It’s true that they had just wiped out scores of businesses and destroyed the livelihoods of innocent strangers, but there was nothing personal about it. Stealing from faceless strangers was one thing; stealing from a trusted colleague was quite another.

  They went their separate ways, knowing all they needed to do was drive cautiously and arrive at the rendezvous point on time before they could say that they’d gotten away with the biggest job they—or anyone—had ever pulled.

  Only one of them needed to make a final stop before he was free to escape from Belgium: the driver heading toward the Brussels airport, about thirty minutes to the south, had to find a place to dump the garbage where it would never be found. Just a few exits from the airport, with the jets clearly visible as they took off and banked over the Belgian capital, he found what looked to be the perfect place.

  Flawless

  Chapter Nine

  ONE MAN’S TRASH IS ANOTHER MAN’S TREASURE

  “They always call it ‘the crime of the century,’ but it never is.”

  —Lodovico Poletto, La Stampa reporter

  At a quarter past six on Monday morning, Jorge Dias De Sousa began his weeklong shift as the caretaker on duty. Though the previous night had been a late one—he’d returned to his apartment in the Diamond Center at three a.m.—he didn’t have the luxury of sleeping in. His duties began a bit earlier than usual, as he had to open the garage to let in maintenance men who were there to do some work on the building. Thirty-five minutes later, he got into the elevator and pushed the button for -2 to unlock the vault for the day, just as he’d done countless times before.

  Expecting darkness in the foyer, he was instead surprised to find the lights on. That was easy enough to dismiss as an oversight by Jacques Plompteux, who could have forgotten to turn them off when he locked the vault on Friday night. “The lights were on,” Jorge recalled later. “Normally the lights are turned off in the evenings. I was thinking Jacques was there first [so] I called him, I called his name.”

  There was no answer, but as soon as he turned to face the vault, Jorge knew Jacques had nothing to do with the lights being left on. “The safe was open,” Jorge said. “When I walked in the safe, I saw everything on the floor.”

  The room was a disaster of open deposit boxes and discarded bags, jewelry pouches, and attaché cases. The storage room door was cracked and ajar; the magnetic alarm that was supposed to be attached to the vault door instead dangled freely from its wiring.

  Like all of the School of Turin’s victims before him, Jorge understood what it was like to not believe his own eyes. As puzzlement turned to panic, he could not comprehend how what he was seeing was possible. No one should have been able to break into the building’s impregnable vault, but that it had happened he couldn’t deny. The Diamond Center had been robbed. Jorge called the police and the building manager, Julie Boost.

  Phones began ringing from one end of Antwerp to the other, a chain reaction that soon had the entire Diamond District buzzing. The first to react were the uniformed police, who ran from their nearby substations, and the sight of cops zeroing in on the Diamond Center sent word rippling outward from every diamantaire they passed along the way that something big had happened. News of a heist was like word of a neighborhood fire: Everyone scrambled to see if they or someone they knew was affected. Before long, the street outside the Diamond Center was clogged with a mob of policemen, journalists, traders, Diamond Center tenants, and curious onlookers.

  Philip Claes, a lawyer for the Antwerp World Diamond Centre who would go on to become its secretary general in 2008, found the area in front of 9–11 Schupstraat mired in chaos and confusion. “People were making gestures, they were surprised and astonished by what happened,” he said. “A lot of people were in shock because their safes were opened. For a lot of people all of their belongings were in the safes . . . Yeah, it was gone. It had disappeared and people just couldn’t understand what happened, how it was possible.”

  The Diamond District police immediately called the federal detectives on the diamond squad, who were just starting their day. A heist trumped any other plans they had; like firemen responding to a five-alarm blaze, they dropped what they were doing, grabbed their coats and car keys, and sped through the streets with blue lights flashing and sirens wailing. They covered the short distance from their headquarters to the Diamond Center in record time.

  Insurance investigator Denice Oliver was also among the first to get an urgent phone call about the heist. She arrived shortly after the initial pandemonium, and quickly learned from tenants that Jorge was distraught. Since neither Julie Boost nor Marcel Grünberger had been at the building when the heist was discovered, Jorge was the senior staff member on site. He was so upset that he let several tenants into the vault to see for themselves what had happened—a misstep for a crime scene that should have been cordoned off. A rumor circulated quickly among the tenants, putting at least part of the blame on the shoulders of Jorge, who wasn’t even on duty the weekend the crime took place. When she arrived at the Diamond Center, Oliver heard from some of the tenants that Jorge admitted keeping the key stamp attached to the pipe and not clearing the code from the combination dial. “Apparently, he had memory problems, and he would go in and lock up the vault room door,” Oliver said, “but he didn’t enter the code and [he] put the key in a box off in the side room . . . He was like a headless chicken down there.”

  Though it sounded hard to believe, such practices were more common than might be imagined. According to safe makers, it was not unusual for safe owners to pick codes that were easy for them to remember, like birthdays or to mutter the combination out loud as they dialed it in, even in the presence of strangers. And it wasn’t unheard of for them to skip clearing the code from the dial for the sake of speed and convenience.

  Fay Vidal, one of the tenants whose box had been broken into and robbed, heard the same thing from one of the police detectives. She was shocked at how carelessly her treasures—and those of the other tenants—had been guarded. “Our dear Jorge, being one lazy S.O.B., decided that it was much too much work to put in that combination every morning,” she said. “So [when locking the door for the night], he just turned the key and left the combination . . . I don’t know if he did it always, I wasn’t there, it’s not me, but that’s what I heard from the inspector.”

  What these accusations fail to take into account was that it was Jacques, not Jorge, who last locked the vault before the heist, something Jorge himself was quick to point out when discussing this accusation years later. “Not me,” he said, “because that week I was not on duty. It was my colleague that closed the safe, do you understand? I never, in fourteen years that I am here, forgot to clear the combination . . . You’re used to doing that, it’s automatic.”

  As for whether Jacques was as careful, Jorge couldn’t say. “Jacques, I don’t know,” he said. “I can’t speak about that . . . That’s possible of course [that he didn’t clear the combination], but I don’t know that.”

  Tenants’ ire may have been directed at Jorge because he was the head caretaker and so was responsible for setting the standards for those he supervised or perhaps simply because he was there that morning. If there were an unwritten policy that it was acceptable to only partially secure the door, it w
ould have applied to Jacques as well as to Jorge.

  By the time the diamond detectives arrived, they found a crime scene that was being explored by dumbstruck civilians and a hysterical concierge. Only when Boost arrived did Jorge get hold of himself, and he did so by following his boss’s orders to keep his mouth shut.

  The detectives, led by Agim De Bruycker and Patrick Peys, took control. They cleared everyone out of the vault and began their investigation. It would take a while before they learned the scope of the heist—their first task was to figure out what the building’s security features and policies were, as only then could they understand what measures the thieves had bypassed—but they could tell from a glance that it was a professional job. They couldn’t help but admire the simple ingenuity of the Styrofoam on the motion detector and the tape on the light sensor.

  Given that the vault door had been opened without being damaged, the detectives first thought this had to be an inside job. They called for Paul De Vos, the locksmith who had installed the vault more than thirty years before, to examine the door and explain how it worked.

  The vault buzzed with activity. Two forensic technicians dressed in white head-to-toe Tyvek outfits like those used to handle hazardous waste dusted for fingerprints. They gingerly picked through the debris on the floor, changing rubber gloves after handling each item to avoid accidentally transferring any DNA that might be on one to another. They collected bits of adhesive tape, the shrouding material blinding the cameras, the tools left behind by the thieves, and the discarded water bottles. Among the many items from the safe deposit boxes littering the floor of the vault were ledgers of diamond transactions. Since the detectives were trained to spot schemes to trade diamonds on the black market, they quickly realized these could hold the key to more crimes than just the heist. Considering the scale of the robbery, however, the detectives decided to ignore any evidence of black diamond transactions they found. Their priority was to try to solve the heist, not add a further layer of misery to those who’d been robbed by looking into whether they’d evaded taxes. “We spoke about it with [the investigating judge assigned to the case, similar to a district attorney] and he agreed with us that it wasn’t the appropriate time to take advantage of what happened,” Peys recalled. “So we didn’t.”