Flawless

by Scott Selby

  Giovanni Poliseri, the elderly “King of Thieves,” was at the top of the list of suspects, according to newspaper reports. In his thirty-plus years as a criminal, Poliseri had figured out how to disable alarms using a technique similar to that used on the motion detector in the Diamond Center vault, by masking them with a cream or a gel. The police didn’t have enough evidence to arrest Poliseri for the Antwerp heist. But just two months later, Belgian police arrested both the sixty-nine-year-old Poliseri and his apprentice Pasquale Scelza for trying to break into the Martens jewelry store in Sint-Niklaas, a town about twenty minutes outside of Antwerp.

  The investigation into those already jailed continued. The Belgians had yet to decide exactly what role Crudo, Zwiep, and Falleti had played and how deeply involved they were, if at all. Although they associated with members of the School of Turin, they weren’t believed to be members themselves. Crudo had never been implicated in Notarbartolo’s schemes before, and Zwiep was Dutch, completely unknown to the Italian police.

  Falleti was more complicated because he was Notarbartolo’s childhood friend, and he knew many of the criminals who orbited around Notarbartolo. But he’d lived in Holland for eighteen years, worked for law enforcement, and had a clean record. His story about his presence in Antwerp and why he was caught holding incriminating evidence was possible but too full of coincidences and inconsistencies for detectives to rule him out.

  At the request of Belgian investigators, Dutch police raided Falleti’s home in Haarlem, spending hours going through drawers and cabinets, upending the mattresses, and poring through bills and documents. They found the newspaper clippings of the heist and a prepaid cell phone, which was suspicious since Falleti was arrested with a cell phone in his pocket. Police also confiscated white gloves and a roll of tape that they believed to be connected to the heist.

  Falleti later laughed about how the searchers were not nearly as thorough as they might have been. For safekeeping, he’d hung a parcel of family jewels and heirlooms on a string behind the radiator in the living room, a discovery that would have been quite suspicious if it had been found. But investigators overlooked it entirely.

  The cell phone, however, was not a laughing matter. On it, the police found evidence that Falleti had used it to call no one but Notarbartolo. Why use an untraceable phone to call him rather than his personal phone? Again, Falleti had what investigators took to be an all-too-convenient answer: He’d bought the phone for his older daughter, he said, but his wife balked, claiming that eleven was too young for a child to have her own cell phone. Rather than return it, he decided to use up the airtime on the phone for personal calls abroad.

  It was another instance when the explanation barely passed muster, this time only because the phone’s call history showed that he didn’t use the prepaid phone to call Notarbartolo’s number that corresponded to the SIM card found in Crudo’s possession. Detectives were still analyzing data on the SIM cards, but suspected that one or both were used as part of a closed telephone network in which the thieves used untraceable prepaid phone numbers to communicate only with one another. The number Falleti had called was Notarbartolo’s official mobile phone number, registered in his name, not one of the anonymous phone numbers that so interested the police.

  The cell phone Falleti normally used yielded more clues. His list of contacts included a confusing number of multiple references to Notarbartolo, including one for P (an abbreviation of Notarbartolo’s childhood nickname, Pino) and one for Tarrun (a reference to Notarbartolo’s southern Italian roots). There was also a number for Pie & Leo, which Falleti told police was a number Notarbartolo asked him to use when calling him in Belgium. Investigators believed Pie was a reference to Pietro Tavano, another member of the School of Turin the Italians had identified as a friend of Notarbartolo’s.

  Falleti and Tavano had been friends for years, from the time Falleti lived in Turin. Tavano had a criminal history that included robbery, aiding and abetting prostitution, and other charges. When investigators questioned Tavano in Italy and confiscated a prepaid cell phone with a Belgian phone number, he professed his innocence and refused to give a DNA sample. Detectives kept him under surveillance and followed him to a café in Turin. When Tavano finished a cappuccino and left, the agents seized the coffee cup off the counter and sent it to a lab for DNA analysis.

  The Italian police were happy to help the Belgians with their investigation in whatever way they could. But as much as police like Martino hoped to put the most skilled of these men behind bars, the School of Turin remained relatively safe from the consequences of crimes committed outside of Italy as long as its members remained in Italy; at that time, it was very difficult for foreign governments to extradite Italian citizens in a case such as this as long as they remained in Italy.

  That didn’t prevent Italian investigators from questioning the suspects. They paid Elio D’Onorio a visit at his home in Latina. The detectives found four cell phones among D’Onorio’s possessions and, even though they didn’t have a warrant, they confiscated a pair of underwear, a toothbrush, and a comb to use for DNA comparison.

  When the Italian detectives confronted D’Onorio with a copy of the document that helped unravel the plot more than anything else—the work invoice found by Belgian detectives in the Floordambos—D’Onorio claimed he’d bid on a contract to install a video camera system in Notarbartolo’s office and said he had driven to Antwerp to discuss it with him. In addition, he denied having anything to do with the robbery of the Diamond Center. He said he had no idea how the invoice wound up among tools and equipment related to the heist.

  Finotto was also picked up for questioning. A week after the heist was discovered, Belgian detectives had visited the Delhaize grocery store that produced the receipt recovered from the household trash found in the Floordambos. Using the receipt’s 1:16 p.m. time stamp as a starting point, they viewed the store’s CCTV surveillance tapes for Thursday, February 13. It didn’t take them long to find what they were looking for. There on the tape, striding into the store at 12:56, was Finotto’s unmistakable figure. The image was grainy, he was wearing a heavy parka, and he was visible only from the chest up. But the cement-block shape of his head, the furrowed brow, and the sharp widow’s peak were undeniably his.

  Under questioning by Italian police in Turin, Finotto denied any involvement whatsoever, cagily pocketing the butts of the cigarettes he smoked during his interrogation so that he wouldn’t leave DNA behind. Belgian detectives located Finotto’s girlfriend in Nice, France, just on the other side of the Alps from Turin, and searched her apartment with the aid of French detectives. In her safe, they found a stack of U.S. currency in $100 bills, subtly marked with a highlighter, matching the description of stolen money submitted by one of the heist victims.

  Not every avenue the investigators followed led to solid evidence. Technicians at Sony, for example, could not coax an image out of the videotape that had been strewn through the trees of the Floordambos. It was simply too damaged. They were able to reconstitute eight strands of videotape found along the shoulder of the highway, but those had nothing to do with the crime; the recordings were of the news, a company meeting, and pornography, all of them discarded for one reason or another along the E19 highway.

  The detectives also discovered just a few days too late that the gold company on Lange Herentalsestraat had a surveillance camera aimed at the Diamond Center’s garage doors. But by the time they requested access to the tapes, the videocassettes had been recycled and taped over.

  The detectives had better luck with the analysis of Notarbartolo’s SIM card. These prepaid cards provided cell phone users with what was essentially a secret phone number that couldn’t be traced to an account with a name and an address. As long as phone calls from these numbers were placed only to other prepaid cards, there was no way to track the identity of the callers.

  But once police had Notarbartolo’s prepaid card, they had access to the private numbers used by the othe
r thieves. There were seven “entities,” as Peys put it, communicating on this closed network. The call records showed the date, time, and duration of calls among the entities. It was also possible to pinpoint the locations where the phones were used by measuring the signal strength between the phone and stationary cell phone towers that relayed the calls. When a certain phone’s signal showed up on more than two towers, simple geometry—performed by a computer—allowed investigators to zero in on a caller’s specific location. The more points of reference there were, the more exact the location, so it was easier to track a cell phone in an urban area than in the countryside because there were more cell phone towers.

  Using this triangulation technique, detectives could tell that Notarbartolo’s phone was in use inside the Diamond Center at various times from just after midnight on February 16 until 4:44 a.m. The calls were placed to Tavano’s prepaid cell, which was determined to be in use at the Charlottalei apartment. Other information from the days leading up to the crime showed cell phone activity among this group of conspirators in an industrial area on the outskirts of Antwerp, home to many machining and fabrication companies. This led detectives to believe the thieves went there to make modifications to their ingenious pulling device.

  The phone traffic immediately after the crime allowed the detectives to track the flight of the thieves as they left Belgium: based on these records, they could tell Notarbartolo drove back to Italy through France, at least one other thief fled through Germany, and yet another went inside the Brussels-National airport, leading to the conclusion that at least one of them flew from Belgium. Detectives scoured the manifests of all flights to Italy on Sunday, February 16, but found no names they recognized. Whoever left Belgium from Brussels was either unknown to the police, used fake documents to buy the plane tickets, or flew to somewhere other than Italy for his getaway.

  After the heist, five of the cell phones, including Notarbartolo’s, reappeared on Monday, February 17, near Lake Iseo, before dispersing in different directions the following day. One went to Latina, and three others toward Turin. The fifth phone fell off the network and was never heard from again. It may well be at the bottom of Lake Iseo. The detectives deduced that the loot was divided near Lake Iseo, but they were unable to pinpoint the exact address from the cell phone data.

  Though the call records brought into clearer focus the guilt of the men the investigators had identified, they also revealed that there were as many as three more people involved who had yet to be found.

  But what sealed the suspects’ fate were the results of the forensic analysis. A piece of tape used to secure the shrouding material over the CCTV camera in the vault foyer had DNA that matched samples taken from personal items at D’Onorio’s house. The half-eaten salami sandwich found in the household trash at the Floordambos, which Notarbartolo had discarded at the apartment as they’d prepared the loot for transport to Italy, matched up with his DNA. Belgian police discovered Finotto’s DNA on a Vittel brand water bottle they recovered from Notarbartolo’s dorm-style refrigerator. Tavano’s DNA was found on items recovered from both the Floordambos and the apartment. The police also discovered male DNA that did not match any of their known suspects, bolstering their theory that there were more as-yet-unidentified accomplices in the crime.

  Other small details helped fill in the cracks. A gem expert in Valenza told police that two men—whom he identified from police photos as Notarbartolo and Finotto—came to him the week after the heist asking about the value of small yellow diamonds they brought with them. He said they both spoke in the lingo of the diamond industry and he took them for professionals. Notarbartolo did most of the talking while Finotto took notes on a laptop. He told investigators that the men didn’t try to sell him the stones but inquired about getting estimates and having them certified.

  A university professor in Turin performed a computer-aided facial analysis on the grainy image of Finotto shopping at Delhaize and compared it to his mug shot. He wrote in a report that the two pictures were of the same person.

  A gemologist in Antwerp analyzed the tiny marquise-shaped emeralds found in the rug Falleti had been carrying and determined in her expert opinion that they were a match to the ones found in the heist trash.

  These reports, combined with the photo of the certified cognac diamond from Notarbartolo’s safe, provided more than enough evidence to charge Notarbartolo, Finotto, D’Onorio, Tavano, and an unidentified fifth person—in the United States, such unknown suspects are commonly identified as “John Doe”—in the robbery of the Diamond Center. Even if convicted, however, the men didn’t face too daunting of a sentence: Belgian law provided for a maximum punishment of only five years imprisonment for a robbery, even if it was of hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of diamonds.

  Prosecutors asked for five years for Notarbartolo’s involvement in the Diamond Center heist as well as an additional five years for being the alleged leader of this criminal organization, an enhancement that meant a potential of ten years total punishment for him.

  Because no plea bargains were permitted in Belgium, the case would go to trial. And the trial against all the suspects would commence regardless of the fact that three of them were enjoying a life of ease in Italy since Belgian law allowed defendants to be tried in absentia. But even if they were convicted in Belgium, at the time the odds were that all they had to do was stay in Italy to avoid doing time. As a practical matter, before legal changes that were still two years away, it would have been next to impossible for Belgium to get Italy to extradite its citizens in a case such as this.

  In terms of house arrests, there were worse options than being confined to Italy.

  The collection of evidence took weeks and the cooperation of law enforcement in four different countries. While almost every new discovery seemed to further implicate Notarbartolo, the investigation also cast doubt on the involvement of Crudo, Zwiep, and Falleti.

  The police eventually learned that three of the four suspects they had in custody had airtight alibis for the time of the heist. Falleti’s employer confirmed that at the time of the robbery, late Saturday night, he had been busy at his job as a parking enforcer in Haarlem. Since he worked for the local police there, this was a solid alibi. Zwiep was able to prove she had been in the Netherlands as well, and Crudo was confirmed to have been in Italy during the heist. The only person in custody without a meaningful alibi was Notarbartolo.

  Still, strong alibis for the night of the heist did not equal freedom, as their roles in the crime may have come at a later time. The wheels of justice turned excruciatingly slowly and the suspects were caught up in the machinery of the Belgian criminal justice system.

  For criminal matters, Belgium, with a justice system based on that of France, had four levels of court. The nature of the heist was such that the suspects bypassed the Tribunal de Police, which heard minor criminal matters. The court of first instance—Tribunal de Première Instance—was known as the Correctional Court, but unlike in the United States, the defendants did not have the right to a jury trial; juries were used with only very serious offenses, and such cases were heard at the Cour d’Assises. Instead of a jury, a panel of three judges would decide their fates. Following the Correctional Court, there was an appellate court, the Court of Appeal of Antwerp. All that remained after that stage was the Supreme Court, the Cour de Cassation, which exclusively handled appeals of law, not of fact.

  Getting to court, however, was an exercise in patience. Court dockets in Antwerp were notoriously overburdened. Each courtroom was regularly booked with as many as twenty cases a day even though judges rarely got through more than five, which led to interminable delays. The situation was further hampered by overly complex procedures, outdated information management systems, and a budget that failed to keep up with the demands of the justice system. De Standaard newspaper reporter Jean-Charles Verwaest once wrote that it seemed at times like Belgian politicians didn’t want a functional court system since they consi
stently failed to address its flaws.

  While waiting for the courtroom appearances, Falleti and Notarbartolo fell into the routines of prison life. Authorities assigned Falleti to outfit new prisoners with clothing, and Notarbartolo read stacks of books and prepared his case. They had been separated from each other only during their initial week of incarceration; since then, the two old friends were part of the general population, and they frequently sought each other out in the exercise yard. They played soccer or walked around the perimeter discussing their circumstances. Other inmates treated them with respect; their reputations as alleged master thieves who pulled off a major heist was bolstered by rumors that they were in the Mafia.

  Notarbartolo was courteous toward the people he dealt with, whether they were guards or fellow prisoners. The only exception was the time Notarbartolo punched an inmate who was giving Falleti a hard time. The man was a new arrival and apparently didn’t know the prison-yard status of the two Italians. As soon as he hit the prisoner, Notarbartolo was backed up by others and the fight was over quickly. Notarbartolo and Falleti had no further problems.

  Once, while talking in the exercise yard, Notarbartolo apologized for the mess he’d gotten his friend into, explaining that he’d thought the apartment would be empty by the time the police arrived. Falleti was a man of good spirits, whose strong Italian values made him cherish friends and family. Given their long history, Notarbartolo was a bit of both to him; it was easy for him to forgive his friend.

  Actually, Falleti found himself oddly relaxed in prison. Of course he worried about his family and wanted to clear his name, but he enjoyed the fact that, while behind bars, he didn’t have to worry about bills, work, and other everyday stresses. Still, he continued to meet with the authorities to appear cooperative in his ongoing attempts to convince them that he wasn’t a thief. Falleti met with investigators as often as twice a week, and he was asked the same questions over and over. Each time, the investigators were just as dissatisfied with his answers as they had been the time before. Falleti felt like he was on a merry-go-round. Meanwhile, Notarbartolo stuck by the last words he’d said to Peys and refused to speak to investigators.