by Scott Selby
Besides potentially incriminating ledgers, the vault floor contained numerous treasures. “I can assure you that whatever was left regarding valuables, if it would have been ours, the six of us, we didn’t have to work anymore,” Peys said. “At that moment it was very difficult and very important that we could return all of those belongings to the right owner. To retrieve them wasn’t the problem, they were lying there on the ground, but who is the owner? That was a major difficulty at that moment. You have some diamonds or jewelry that are easily recognizable and nobody’s going to discuss about it, but some kind of diamonds or money or whatever, there might be a very serious discussion about [who owned] it. We found for example a bar of gold. Just like that. A bar of gold. No name on it, of course, so who is the owner of the bar of gold?”
To help sort it out, the detectives ordered a desk be set up in the foyer. They allowed tenants to descend to the vault level in groups to speak to investigators.
“The landing was full of people,” Vidal said of the scene outside the vault. “You had to come and give your name, safe number, and all that. Then there were three policemen inside the vault, each taking care of one person. We were queuing up outside after we’d given our name and one by one, they let somebody in and that person would then go to their own safe to see if it was opened or not.”
Those waiting for their turn in the vault were “decimated, destroyed,” according to Vidal’s description of the crowd that day. When she herself was led into the vault, she found that her small letterbox safe was open and empty except for some envelopes that contained nothing of value to the thieves. Everything else—gold trinkets from when her daughters were children, jewelry she’d inherited from her mother—was gone. She saw that the deadbolt was bent at about a 45-degree angle.
The detectives asked her to look around on the floor and see if there was anything she recognized as hers. It was an arduous task, like sifting through a landfill.
“The floor was littered that high, from one side to the other, with what they didn’t take,” Vidal said, gesturing with her hands to illustrate the clutter on the floor. “There were bags: plastic bags, travel bags, linen bags. People just put things into their safe with a bag. Then there were coupons, bonds, papers like that . . . There was jewelry on the floor as well.” She found nothing that was hers.
Tenants who were able to identify their belongings weren’t allowed to leave with them. The valuables were still considered evidence, so the police placed them in clear plastic bags, wrote the tenant’s name on the outside, and kept the property to sort out later, after the forensic team had a chance to examine the items.
Denice Oliver set up her own triage operation to begin the Herculean task of processing insurance claims and assembling a list of stolen goods. When she had heard that there had been “an incident,” as she called it, at the Diamond Center, she hadn’t been greatly surprised. She’d been in the building numerous times to visit clients, and although she had never been allowed to closely inspect its security measures, she hadn’t been impressed with what she saw. She had long ago dismissed the staff as inadequate; in fact, she didn’t consider the concierges who checked visitors in and out of the building to be legitimate security guards. On previous visits to the Diamond Center, she was amazed that she could take as much time as she liked wandering its halls, no questions asked. “Everything in that building was just so lax,” she said later.
While Oliver interviewed her clients and the police puzzled over how the thieves had penetrated the vault, Paul De Vos explained to detectives how the LIPS door operated. He had to draw a verbal picture of the two-part key because it couldn’t be found amid the debris on the floor. The detectives assumed the thieves had taken it with them. De Vos explained that he didn’t know the combination to the safe because he always averted his eyes when it was being reset, but he told them who did. Those people went to the top of the detectives’ list of suspects.
De Vos was also asked to examine the safe deposit box doors. Like the detectives, he couldn’t understand how the thieves had opened the safes. He knew that the faceplates were a weak point, but he didn’t think it was possible to pry the doors open. He took his time moving from one broken door to the next, examining each carefully. Then he noticed something strange about one of the unopened boxes, number 25: there was a sheered-off prong of metal protruding from the keyhole. He pointed it out to the detectives. They had their first clue as to how the thieves had opened the safe doors.
When August “Gust” Van Camp woke up Monday morning, he couldn’t remember whether or not he’d locked the heavy green metal gate on the service road leading into the Floordambos forest the day before. If he had forgotten, it was out of character. Well into his sixties and retired from a career as a grocer, Van Camp was meticulous about the care of this picturesque stand of woods on the outskirts of Brussels. He patrolled them nearly every day as a member of the conservation organization Jacht en Natuurbeheer, or Hunting and Nature.
It was Van Camp’s self-imposed duty to keep trespassers off the land, a wildlife and nature preserve, and it was a never-ending job. He treated the responsibility as if he were guarding a nuclear missile site; if he wasn’t at home or helping a friend tend his nearby pumpkin patch, he could be found walking the paths of the green forest or the cornfield that abutted its edge, shotgun on his shoulder and his trusty English Springer Spaniel bounding along beside him.
Van Camp was perpetually on the lookout for dirt bikers who tore along the area’s wooded paths on loud motorbikes, and for other trespassers who treated the forest like a garbage dump. It never failed that Van Camp discovered beer bottles and cigarette butts deep in the glades, the telltale signs of some late-night teen party. People even dumped household appliances and old furniture in the underbrush. Once, he discovered a pile of dozens of old tires that had been tossed in the middle of the rutted dirt road separating the field from the trees. Years before, he’d even found a dead body in a wooded ditch, a victim of foul play.
Van Camp hated that fact that so few people seemed to share his devotion to preserving the natural beauty of the woods. Over the years, his mission to protect the Floordambos from litterbugs began to look less like a job to enjoy in retirement and more like an obsession. Anyone encountering Van Camp on his regular foot patrols wouldn’t think of him as the friendly neighborhood woodsman but as the tyrannical guardian of the forest who was best not encountered twice. He’d gotten so frustrated at the endless stream of litter that he took to calling the police on a regular basis. His name and his gruff voice became well known at the local police station. In fact, they considered him something of a nuisance. In most cases, his calls went unheeded and there was nothing for him to do but gripe to his dog and clean it up himself.
Although it rarely helped, Van Camp always locked the gate on the dirt road that led from the cornfield into the forest. Waking up that Monday morning, he was troubled by the thought that he might have forgotten to do so the day before. He dressed in his standard outfit (a camouflage T-shirt under his overcoat, a faded green baseball cap, and grubby blue work pants tucked into thick rubber boots that came halfway to his knees), kissed his wife good-bye, and grabbed his keys. As always, he brought along his shotgun in case he spotted a rabbit or a pheasant.
Van Camp drove his dusty white Volkswagen van the few miles from his tidy home on a suburban street in Vilvoorde, a village just a few miles from Brussels and its international airport, to the forest. Originally part of an eighteenth-century estate, the Floordambos was divided into two by the E19 highway that connected Brussels to Antwerp. The local government had placed seventeen acres of it under protection in 1991. Van Camp owned some of the land he patrolled, but acted as if he owned the whole forest.
Van Camp turned on to a wooded road where a tongue of dirt emerged between the trees on the right and led into the cornfield. He trundled the van down the pitted track until he reached the end of the field at the steep berm leading up to the highway. Where
the path curved left into the dense trees, the dark green gate stood wide open. Annoyed he’d forgotten, Van Camp parked, grabbed his shotgun, and decided to take a stroll into the forest before coming back to lock the gate.
Approaching a fork in the road, Van Camp started to turn left, away from the sound of speeding traffic on the highway, when he stopped in his tracks, his attention caught by something in the path straight ahead. He muttered a string of colorful Flemish curses, his pleasant morning walk ruined by the sight of empty champagne bottles in the middle of the wide path. As he walked closer, he saw that the bottles were only the tip of the iceberg.
In the underbrush to the right of the path was what looked like a Dumpster’s worth of large gray garbage bags, some spilled open. They hadn’t been there as recently as late afternoon the day before, when he’d last patrolled the area. They were littered over an area ten to twenty feet from the path and scattered around the bases of small trees. If it hadn’t been for the champagne bottles lying in the open, he might have walked past the mess without noticing; despite the lack of leaves on the bare trees in February, the branches of the undergrowth formed a screen that was hard to see through from the path. Van Camp propped his rifle against a tree and began rooting through the trash bags, determined to find something—a discarded piece of mail, perhaps—that would identify whoever was too lazy to find a proper rubbish bin. He fully intended to file another police report.
Within one of the bags, Van Camp found a smaller white trash bag from a Delhaize grocery store that was filled with kitchen waste, including used coffee grounds, a half-eaten sandwich, and some torn-up pieces of paper. He pulled out the shreds of paper and examined them closely, noting that he could make out part of an Antwerp address. He pawed deeper into the larger bag and found brown paper envelopes and other documents from the Diamond District, including what seemed to him to be certificates or invoices for individual diamonds. He knew for certain there was something odd about the trash when he discovered one of the bags contained Indian rupees.
At the same time that Van Camp was fuming in the forest over yet another brazen example of disrespect to his precious forest, his wife Annie was at home watching the news. The story dominating the broadcast wasn’t that Venus Williams had won the singles match in the Proximus Games and come one step closer to winning the diamond-encrusted tennis racquet. Instead, the lead story was about a spectacular burglary that had occurred over the weekend in Antwerp’s Diamond Square Mile. A vault in one of the big diamond office buildings had been looted and the thieves had gotten away with untold millions of dollars’ worth of diamonds. Though no one had yet calculated the amount of the loss, reporters were already calling it “the heist of the century.”
The Van Camps would disagree for years over which of them connected the dots to realize that the garbage strewn in the Floordambos was from the great heist in Antwerp. According to Gust Van Camp, he realized right away that the refuse was connected to a diamond robbery, although he had yet to hear the news that the Diamond Center had been looted. His wife, however, tells a slightly different story. According to her version, Van Camp returned from the forest livid at the desecration, intending to call the police to report yet another incidence of littering. When he described some of the odd contents of the garbage bags, it was she who made the connection to the Diamond Center heist.
It was indisputable, however, that Gust Van Camp had discovered a treasure trove of valuable clues. He called the local police, and they, in turn, called the investigators in Antwerp. The local officers cordoned off the area and awaited the arrival of the federal detectives, who wasted no time speeding south along the E19 highway. Before it was even noon on Monday, the forest was crawling with investigators, who photographed the scene, gathered the trash, and walked for miles through the underbrush looking for additional evidence. For the police, it was an astonishing break early in the case; the heist had been discovered only a few hours before.
The trash had been discarded in a flat area between the path and the steep slope leading up to the highway that was about thirty yards wide. From the forest floor, it was another twenty yards or so up to the shoulder of the road. It was too far for the thieves to have heaved the garbage over the guardrail. The trees between the highway and the location of the trash would have made that impossible anyway. Investigators surmised that the thieves had driven past the forest on the highway, taken the exit to Vilvoorde, and circled back until they found the dirt access road leading into the cornfield. The champagne bottles suggested they had spent some time toasting the discovery of what they thought was the perfect place to lose the trash forever.
Indeed, it would have been perfect if anyone but Van Camp had been in charge of keeping an eye on things. As they drove out of Antwerp, the thieves would have been anxious to get rid of the garbage as soon as they were a reasonable distance away from the city. They didn’t want to risk driving with it for too long. Large teeming bags of refuse filling the trunk and the back seat would be hard to explain to a highway cop should they be pulled over for a traffic violation. Cruising down the open highway, it was easy for them to think they’d have their choice of dump locations before getting to Brussels. There was no shortage of places they could have gotten rid of the evidence—including gas stations, rest areas, and the refuse bins outside of restaurants near the highway—but they probably didn’t want to take the chance of being caught dumping so many bags. Business owners in Belgium were serious about preventing the unauthorized use of their garbage cans. Many were locked and some were even monitored by security cameras. That was especially true of businesses along the highways.
“On every highway you have gasoline stations. Everywhere there are signs that it is forbidden to throw [away] personal belongings,” Peys explained. “It’s forbidden. There are cameras in those petrol stations. I can imagine if I had that garbage, I wouldn’t throw it away in an official garbage bin that is standing next to the public way as you never know who is going to collect it.”
By the time the thieves could see airplanes leaving from the Brussels airport, the little stand of trees seemed like their last opportunity. After dumping the trash, they did nothing to destroy its evidentiary value, such as burning it. Doing so would have risked drawing unwanted attention. Smoke rising from a fire in a forest so close to the highway would have been hard for authorities to ignore. While not burning the trash can be seen as a huge mistake in retrospect, at the time it made perfect sense just to leave it where it seemed well hidden. The thieves drove out of the Floordambos confident that their stash of garbage would never be found.
But thanks to Van Camp, the hiding place lasted only half a day. It was the first time the School of Turin’s luck went against it, and detectives were well aware that it was only by pure chance that the garbage was discovered so soon after the heist.
“We’re talking about a highway that has miles of forest and green next to it,” Peys said. “I’m talking about thirty or forty kilometers [from Antwerp]. Now, on thirty-eight of those kilometers, nobody would ever bother about trash, and after months it would be taken by public services and thrown away . . . For one reason or another, it’s written in the stars, they threw the garbage right on that spot, where that guy is coming every day and annoying himself every day about rubbish that’s thrown away by people.”
The champagne bottles, the unopened bags, the emptied shells of Sony videocassette tapes from the CCTV system, and the material Van Camp had handled were carefully packaged up and transported back to Antwerp. Police technicians made plaster casts of tire treads found in the softer soil. Officers searching the underbrush found long ribbons of videotape strung through the foliage a few dozen yards from the trash dump that presumably belonged to the dismantled videocassettes they’d already found.
The videotape was carefully gathered up, and one of the investigators organized a search party to scour the shoulders of the highway for miles in both directions to see if they could find additional clues. It s
eemed to pay off: searchers found numerous strands of videotape all along the road, as if someone had held one end of the tape and tossed the spool out the window so that it would unwind in the hope that it would degrade from exposure to the elements. Police thought that these bits of tape could also be from the dismantled CCTV videocassettes. Eventually, all of the recovered tape was sent to the Belgian headquarters of Sony for expert reconstruction.
The heart of the investigation moved to the diamond detectives’ offices at the federal police building and to the Antwerp Forensics Laboratory, a plain building just across the street. Peys and the others who’d been in the vault returned after sundown with their load of evidence at the same time that detectives who’d gone to the Floordambos returned with the garbage bags. The bags were opened and their contents carefully sorted and logged.
“It was the day after that colleagues tried to reconstruct what was in those garbage bags,” Peys said. “It came surely from the heist, but finding clues toward the suspects is something different. It wasn’t obvious, I assure you.”