by Scott Selby
The brothers opened the door without a fight, and soon investigators were scouring the bedrooms, the living room, the billiard room, and even Notarbartolo’s detached workshop. In the backyard, they attempted to search a two-thousand-gallon tank of heating oil, but they had no comparably sized container in which to transfer the oil, and emptying it onto the ground to see if there was a cache of diamonds inside would have been an unforgivable act of pollution if it yielded no evidence. They tried a different tactic to see if it was worth the effort: with Francesco and Marco Notarbartolo standing nearby, several officers put on a loud and exuberant show, pretending they’d found the mother lode. But the brothers didn’t so much as twitch at the bait.
Of course the officers found no weapons, but, when they ordered one of the sons to open the family safe, they found cash (euros, dollars, and British pounds amounting to about $97,000), jewelry, and seventeen diamonds. At the moment, the detectives had no idea if they were connected to the heist. Although some of the diamonds were in certification blister packs, that wasn’t necessarily suspicious; it was to be expected in the home of a jeweler with an office in Antwerp.
Since the Italian detectives didn’t have a list of goods stolen from the Diamond Center, the best they could do was catalog and photograph their discovery. Officially, they were there looking for weapons, not diamonds, and so had no authority to seize them. The packaged diamonds, including an unusual 70-point cognac, were carefully photographed so that their certificate numbers and accompanying information were clear. Pieces of jewelry were removed from the plastic Ziploc bags they were stored in and individually photographed.
All the goods went back into the safe, and Martino placed Marco Notarbartolo in charge of safeguarding all of the items. It was a binding order, effectively making him legally responsible for the safekeeping of the gems and jewels they’d inventoried and photographed. Such orders were usually reserved for property that was unreasonable for the police to take physical possession of, such as livestock, boats, and other such items. Although it seemed like a case of ordering the fox to protect the hens, there was nothing else they could do except threaten Marco Notarbartolo with the full severity of the law if he failed to comply. He accepted the edict stoically.
Empty-handed except for what was on their cameras, the police drove the forty-five minutes back to Turin to e-mail the photos to their colleagues in Antwerp.
While the Italian police were busy searching their home in Trana that Friday, Notarbartolo and Crudo were in the rented Peugeot driving over the Alps toward the one place where they were least expected to go: back to Antwerp. He’d had several days to bask in the afterglow of pulling off the greatest heist in history. As far as he was concerned, they’d executed it perfectly and left no trace of themselves behind.
It was important to return to Antwerp for several reasons. He had to return the rental car he’d driven after the heist to Italy. He also had to thoroughly clean the Charlottalei apartment, since they had left in a hurry and didn’t have the time to do a proper job of eliminating any trace of a connection to the heist. He also had to return to the Diamond Center so that he could badge in and out one final time; he knew the police would be watching the computerized traffic to see if any of the tenants failed to return to work after the heist.
It seemed like a suicide mission to return to the scene of the crime, but Notarbartolo was bloated with confidence, even after newspapers reported that the trash had been discovered in the thieves’ supposedly impossible-to-find dump location. He had no idea anything in the garbage could be connected to him—he didn’t know the household trash with D’Onorio’s work order had also been tossed into the forest—or that the police had already searched his office and his safe deposit box.
Notarbartolo knew from two long years of experience that the Diamond District would be practically deserted late Friday afternoon due to the Jewish Sabbath, so he planned to slip in and out of the Diamond Center just before closing time, when the fewest number of diamantaires would be around to see him.
He was so sure that he could charm his way in and out of the Diamond Center that he called his old friend Antonino Falleti, who lived in the Netherlands, and asked him to bring his family to Antwerp for dinner on his last weekend in town. He was done with Belgium, he told his friend; after this last trip, he would no longer have an apartment or a business office in Antwerp, so this was their last chance to see each other until their paths crossed again. He arranged for Falleti to meet him and Crudo at the Charlottalei apartment around 6:00 p.m. Notarbartolo and Crudo planned to leave Antwerp the next day, Saturday, on a Ryanair flight from Brussels to Milan he’d booked over the Internet.
Once they returned to Italy, they would be home free.
Antonino Falleti, who bore an uncanny resemblance to a younger Robert De Niro, was notoriously bad with directions. He’d made the trip from Haarlem in the Netherlands to Antwerp with time to spare, arriving in the city by 5:30 p.m. on Friday, February 21. Once there, however, he had trouble getting to Notarbartolo’s apartment. So he called his friend’s cell phone to ask for directions and Notarbartolo answered after just one ring. It took another half an hour for Falleti to find his way through Antwerp’s network of winding streets before he arrived outside Charlottalei 33. Falleti was excited to see his friend again.
“Tonino,” as Antonino Falleti was called, had known Notarbartolo almost his entire life. Their dads had both worked as truck drivers; they also lived in the same building growing up. His older brother Mimmo was Notarbartolo’s best friend since childhood. While Tonino was eight years younger than Mimmo and Notarbartolo, that came to matter less and less as they got older. Like all of Notarbartolo’s friends, Falleti called him “Leo,” but also “Pino,” a nickname from childhood, or “Tarrun,” referring to his southern Italian roots.
Falleti had brought along his wife, Judith Zwiep, and their eight-and eleven-year-old daughters, as well as a feast of home-cooked Italian food in Tupperware containers. While their wives took the food and the children up to the apartment, Falleti followed Notarbartolo to the car rental company to return the Peugeot.
After returning the car, Notarbartolo got in Falleti’s car and instructed him to drive to the Empire Shopping Center, where they parked on Appelmansstraat, a narrow boulevard connected to the streets of the Diamond District by the mall. The indoor shopping center was filled with luxury retailers as well as service businesses for the diamond industry, such as a beauty salon, a small kosher food market, and several diamond supply companies. It was also filled with a wide variety of ethnic restaurants where diamantaires could find something resembling the food of their heritage regardless of their ethnicity. The two Italians settled in to drink a beer and catch up.
Falleti worked in Haarlem as a parking enforcement officer, and, although he’d been in the Netherlands for nearly twenty years, he remained constantly homesick for Italy. He cherished his visits with a fellow Turinese, and, during the time of Notarbartolo’s long reconnaissance, he’d come to Antwerp from time to time to visit his friend. He later told police he knew little more about Notarbartolo’s activities than what Notarbartolo told him: that he worked in Antwerp to buy stones for his Italian businesses and to supply his jewelry design hobby. Notarbartolo had also once told Falleti that all of his transactions were off the books; he bought diamonds on the black market because they were cheaper and avoided the hassle and expense of Belgian taxes, he said.
If that were true, it might explain what the police already knew by that point: Damoros Preziosi hadn’t recorded a single diamond transaction with the diamond industry authorities in all the time it was in Antwerp. To the detectives, it was yet more proof that Notarbartolo rented an office in the Diamond Center purely to case it for the heist.
What Notarbartolo told his friend, however, wasn’t impossible, just highly unlikely. Diamond companies importing or exporting diamonds outside the European Union were required to have their parcels examined by experts from the
Belgian customs agencies, the Federal Public Service’s Economy and Finance departments. This was called the “Diamond Office” for short, and it oversaw several important functions. It estimated a parcel’s value to ensure that it conformed with what the importer or exporter claimed, then it confirmed the type of diamonds being transported and their weight, and, in the case of rough diamonds, it checked that the parcel was accompanied by a Kimberley Process certificate guaranteeing that the stones weren’t from conflict zones. The documents were important to the government for tax reasons, but they were also important to the diamantaire in that they provided some measure of independent proof of the value of their stocks. Diamond Office documents were used by banks to verify the value of goods they were being asked to finance, and by insurance companies as proof of a company’s assets.
That was the official procedure, but everyone in Antwerp knew transactions regularly happened off the books for a variety of reasons, such as convenience, tax avoidance, money laundering, cost, or uncertainty over a diamond’s origins. Still, Philip Claes of the Antwerp World Diamond Centre considered it “ridiculous” that a diamond company in operation for more than two years would never show up on the Diamond Office’s registry, not even peripherally as a customer of another company.
Over their beers, Notarbartolo told Falleti that he’d already cleared out his space at the Diamond Center and was shutting down his Antwerp office to focus his attention in Turin. Though both men were eager to get back to the apartment for dinner, Notarbartolo told Falleti he needed to drop by the Diamond Center first, to check his mail. They might as well walk over since they were so close, he said. Notarbartolo knew that he needed to swipe his badge through the turnstiles at the Diamond Center at least one more time, and there were only a few minutes left before the building was locked for the night. This seemed like the perfect opportunity.
Falleti, like most people in Europe who followed the news, was well aware of the heist. In fact, there had been a bulletin on the radio during his drive from the Netherlands. He had even clipped newspaper articles about the robbery, thinking he’d save them for Notarbartolo, but had forgotten them at home in the Netherlands. Falleti was no stranger to Notarbartolo’s past, and he suspected his friend might have had some involvement. He didn’t want to get involved, so he didn’t ask any questions, at least not as they sat over beers just a few hundred yards from the scene of the crime.
They walked through the mall and exited onto the Diamond District at the junction of Hoveniersstraat and Rijfstraat. It was cold, so Notarbartolo wore a heavy parka over his dark sweater, white button-down shirt, and dark casual pants.
Just as he’d hoped, there were hardly any people strolling the district at that time of day.
Notarbartolo envisioned himself pushing through the plate glass doors into a nearly empty main hallway and breezing past the main guard with, at most, a “bonsoir” before swiping through the turnstiles and heading to the elevators. He needn’t stay long; in fact, the sooner he could feign accomplishing some errand in his office, the sooner he could take the elevator back down to casually swipe out again. He didn’t even bring the key to his office or his safe deposit box; his plan was to be in and out in a hurry. He didn’t want to risk running into anyone who would delay him longer than was absolutely necessary to accomplish this final task and then vanish forever into the night.
Unfortunately for him, Notarbartolo did not know that he was no longer the most overlooked tenant at the Diamond Center. Instead, he was the most wanted man in Belgium. And everyone on the building’s security staff knew it.
Julie Boost had assisted the police in executing the search warrant on Notarbartolo’s office and safe deposit box. She had helped police get access to the hundreds of hours of the Diamond Center’s surveillance tape they examined to see what he’d been doing in the days leading up to the heist. She’d also ordered all of the guards to keep an eye out for Notarbartolo, but, like the police, no one in the Diamond Center thought they’d ever see him again.
Kamiel, the guard in the front security booth, was as stunned as the day he’d learned the building had been robbed when he saw the jeweler approaching the front doors. Notarbartolo, who was with another man the guard did not recognize, sauntered in from the cold, smiling as pleasantly as ever, while his companion remained outside. Kamiel overcame his shock and discretely grabbed the phone to raise the alarm that Notarbartolo was back in the building. In quick succession, he dialed his boss (Julie Boost) and the diamond detectives. As with all the Diamond Center’s staff members, these detectives had interrogated Kamiel frequently since Monday and he knew their direct number.
Boost had been through the wringer that week. As the building manager, she had initially been among the primary suspects since she was one of the few people who knew the code to the vault door. She had also been the subject of scathing criticism among the tenants for the slack level of security in the Diamond Center. Now, she saw her opportunity to redeem herself by helping apprehend the man who’d robbed her building, and she acted decisively.
Boost dropped what she had been doing and raced to the lobby. She intercepted Notarbartolo in the main hallway, turning on her own long-dormant charm to greet him as if he were a lost son. Speaking in French, she began a long recitation of the week’s events, acting as if she assumed he was there to find out if his safe deposit box had been looted. Even though this was precisely the sort of encounter he had hoped to avoid, Notarbartolo listened politely; he didn’t want to seem suspicious by dodging her questions. As Boost prattled on about news of the heist, Kamiel’s phone call to the federal police headquarters had ignited a frenzy of activity.
At the time their phone started ringing, the diamond detectives were at an impasse. Since Monday, when the robbery had been discovered, they’d been working twenty-hour days tracking down suspects. They were tired and frustrated.
Detective Peys remembers well that the downturn in morale after a swift few days of nailing down solid leads fizzled to the realization that the thieves might be gone for good. “It doesn’t happen like in the States, where we take the airplane and go to Italy,” Peys said. “It always has to go officially and it takes some time. It will take us, let’s say, approximately a week or at least a few days to get there, which we were going to do, to get to Italy and to confront Notarbartolo with what was going on. But at that time, we couldn’t go there, willing or not. We had the possibility, physically, but not the permission.”
Even with permission, a trip to Italy still might not have resulted in an arrest. That would have been at the discretion of the Italian authorities, and even then, the possibility of extradition to Belgium to stand trial was remote. At the time, it was very difficult to get Italy to extradite one of its citizens for a nonviolent crime, no matter how dramatic the financial impact.
With Notarbartolo apparently slipping from their grasp, the detectives decided early Friday evening to relieve the tension of the week and take a few personal hours for themselves. Agim De Bruycker, the unit commander, went with a few of the visiting investigators to a nearby pub to unwind over a few glasses of beer. Peys was on his way to pick up his wife for dinner at a restaurant. The only detectives still working in the office when Kamiel called were Kris De Bot and Gerry Vanderkelen, who were interviewing Marcel Grünberger.
“The interview with Mr. Grünberger just at that moment ended,” De Bot later recalled, “and he was reading his declaration again. At that moment the call came in, I immediately took contact with the local police because they have a station not so far from the building of the Diamond Center . . . They have patrol cars and policemen in the neighborhood, so when there’s something very urgent, they go first.”
This was a delicate moment. De Bot and Vanderkelen were ten minutes away, even if they sped there with lights and sirens wailing. The Diamond District was filled with cops, but the last thing the diamond detectives wanted was for the district police, who would be there first, to arrest Notarbartolo.
“We needed guys [on the scene] who knew the importance of Notarbartolo, but who also knew that it was as important to know where he stayed,” Peys said. “Arresting somebody, throwing him to the ground, and then saying ‘Okay, you’re the suspect, we have every evidence and now we want to know where you live,’ that’s where it stops.”
The diamond detectives needed Notarbartolo to think he was nothing more than an important witness and to volunteer his address as part of a routine interview. If they could get to him before he slipped away, it was possible that any associates of his who might have been watching could retreat to frantically clean out his apartment and scour it of vital clues. Since Kamiel had noticed that another man had accompanied Notarbartolo, this was a real possibility in the minds of the detectives. The ticking clock they faced was the possibility that someone connected to Notarbartolo would notice his detention and then quickly react by destroying potential evidence. The detectives would not learn where Notarbartolo’s apartment was in time if the district police stormed into the Diamond Center and slapped handcuffs on him. Once Notarbartolo was placed under arrest, the detectives anticipated that, as a professional criminal, he wouldn’t tell them anything.
De Bot called the district police, described what was going on at the Diamond Center, and gave strict instructions to keep Notarbartolo at the Diamond Center but not arrest him or say anything about his being a suspect.
As De Bot peeled out of the parking lot, Vanderkelen sat in the passenger seat frantically calling the other detectives. While they had planned on joining everyone at the bar and had only been in the office to finish their interview with Grünberger, the other detectives would now join them instead. Across town, the eight investigators drinking with De Bruycker put their beers aside and rushed to the Diamond District. Peys did a U-turn and called his wife to tell her he would be going back to the office again.