Flawless

by Scott Selby

  This development meant that, for all practical intents, the verdict of this one court was final and non-reviewable. Notarbartolo and his fellow defendants had just one roll of the dice to find out if they would go to jail for five to ten years or go free.

  The trial moved from the Correctional Court to the Court of Appeal building at Britse Lei 35A, just a three-minute drive from the Prison of Antwerp. The industrial-looking court house, built in the 1960s, was clearly influenced by the architecture of the time.

  Courtroom A, the first on the left when entering the building, was almost perfectly cube-shaped, with a high ceiling. Adorned with a few wooden pews facing a long bracket-shaped table for the judges and court staff, the echoey room was bare of decorations, save for a tiny no-frills institutional clock that was the only relief on a vast wall of brown bricks behind the judges’ bench. The judges sat on bright orange kindergarten-style plastic chairs that were a few shades more intense than the orange carpeting on their dais. These clashed mightily with fluorescent green desk pads and the electric blue curtains. To complete the palate, one wall was painted mustard yellow and the main door bright red. Fluorescent tubes hummed overhead. Overall, the room looked more likely to host Alcoholics Anonymous meetings than criminal trials.

  The press was allowed to take pictures and film in the lobby, but not in the courtroom itself. The only pictures they were able to capture of the Man of Gold during the trial were snapped as police escorted him to and from the courtroom. Notarbartolo looked bookish and mild-mannered in casual civilian clothes and eyeglasses.

  Although six people were on trial, only three defendants showed that day: Antonino Falleti, Leonardo Notarbartolo, and Adriana Crudo. The charges against Zwiep had been dropped, but she came to court to support her husband. The members of the School of Turin still hiding out in Italy—Finotto, D’Onorio, and Tavano—had hired Belgian attorneys, although these lawyers did not fully participate in the court case. The lawyers for the three defendants present in court needed to aggressively defend their clients since they faced immediate detention should they be convicted. The lawyers for the men in Italy, on the other hand, had a different and less straightforward role to play.

  Of course their clients wanted to be acquitted, but these lawyers needed to tailor their participation carefully, with an eye toward later arguments in an Italian court over matters of extradition, were the men ever to be arrested. A likely argument would be that a Belgian conviction should be ignored on the basis that they were not present at their trial. In anticipation of such a situation, their lawyers needed to make a difficult decision. They could vigorously defend their clients in court in the hopes of getting them acquitted, or they could carefully limit their involvement by simply observing the proceedings. They could then later argue that their clients did not have full representation at trial.

  The presiding judge sat in the middle and asked the majority of the questions, while the two associate judges flanking him mostly listened. Despite the difference in titles, they were theoretically equals; after the evidence was presented and the arguments heard, they would deliberate the verdict behind closed doors. The majority decision would stand as the unanimous decision, since there were no dissenting opinions accompanying Belgian verdicts as there were in the United States. Any dissent about a decision would stay between the three of them.

  The trial also differed from those in the United States in that neither party called witnesses to testify before the court. Instead, sworn statements were simply admitted into evidence as part of the case file.

  On March 10, 2005, the defense lawyers were finally able to make their arguments in court. Notarbartolo’s lawyer, Walter Damen, argued that his client was not the ringleader. Damen wisely did not try to argue Notarbartolo’s innocence—the evidence was difficult to dispute—but instead focused on arguing that the real mastermind remained safely in Italy. As Damen had said a year before on Primetime Live, when asked about his client’s innocence, “Obviously, he isn’t the most innocent guy you’re likely to meet. I do agree that there is a series of important elements that indicate that Notarbartolo knows something about what happened. But there’s always a minimum and a maximum penalty. We are looking for the minimum.”

  If successful, this tactic would cut Notarbartolo’s sentence from a mandatory ten years to only five if he were found guilty. Considering he’d already served more than two years awaiting trial, it was possible under this scenario that he could be released before the end of the year, taking into account good behavior as a factor in early release, which was common in Belgium. Notarbartolo had been careful to be a model prisoner.

  “When that gang in fact operates from Italy, and the real boss, therefore, sits there, then my client is not the leader and so the maximum penalty should be five years,” Damen argued before the judges.

  The lawyer’s argument was not without merit. Even the lead investigators—both in Italy and Belgium—had doubts that Notarbartolo was the “mastermind” who coordinated, organized, and financed every detail of the Diamond Center heist. An operation of that complexity required a lot of financial backing. Rent alone at the office and the apartment had cost about 30,000 over the course of the planning for the heist. Other expenses such as airfare, technical equipment, and machining and engineering costs were harder to calculate with certainty, but they added up to sizable bill over the more than two years of plotting and reconnaissance. Notarbartolo may have been the face of the School of Turin as its crafty inside man, but those investigating the case were relatively sure he wasn’t the leader. Detectives in both countries agreed that whoever masterminded the Diamond Center heist had never been identified. That didn’t mean, however, that they thought Notarbartolo should be shown any leniency—they would be happy to see him serve as long of a sentence as possible for all the charges against him.

  At least one reporter, La Stampa’s Lodovico Poletto, thought it unlikely that Notarbartolo had the acumen to mastermind such a complex and delicate job. Despite the mythology surrounding Notarbartolo, thanks to the lionizing press coverage, Poletto continued to consider him just a skilled amateur swept up in the plans of greater men. He suspected Pancrazio Chiruzzi, “the Soloist with the Kalashnikov,” might have been the brains.

  After the heist hit the newspapers in 2003, Poletto tracked down Chiruzzi to discuss it with him, finding the career criminal full of admiration for the job but also willing to offer a little post-heist analysis regarding some minor details he would have done differently. Chiruzzi denied any involvement, and he was never implicated by police, but Poletto remained skeptical. “You can see the hand of Pancrazio behind all of this,” he said.

  No alternate masterminds were mentioned in court, however. Notarbartolo was unwilling to address the judges. If he had talked, his legendary charm might have been able to persuade the court that someone else was the leader, but that would violate the criminal code he operated under. From the time he was arrested all the way through his trial, Notarbartolo never said a word that implicated anyone else although his lawyer blamed an unnamed person back in Italy as being the mastermind.

  Another theory floating about was that Notarbartolo had been intentionally set up to take the fall for the heist by whoever dumped the trash. The thinking was that there could only be one mastermind, so Notarbartolo was being offered as the sacrificial lamb to take the longest prison sentence off the table for the rest of them.

  None of the investigators gave this theory much credence, because such a double cross relied on far too many variables. The garbage was actually quite well hidden in the Floordambos if you discounted the fact that the forest was scoured almost daily by an obsessive caretaker. For the theory to make any sense, the conspirators would have had to have known Gust Van Camp would find the garbage quickly. Plus, it relied on Notarbartolo’s having the nerve to go through with his plan to badge back into the Diamond Center after the discovery of the garbage, and on his being intercepted by police. The garbage had also le
d investigators to four of the perpetrators, not just Notarbartolo. D’Onorio was most obviously implicated because his business card and work invoice were discovered. In fact, it had taken a fair amount of detective work to learn of Notarbartolo’s involvement.

  Yet another theory was that Notarbartolo had agreed to take the risk of being nabbed as the leader in order to protect the others. Insurance investigator Denice Oliver was a proponent of that idea; she believed Notarbartolo knew enough about the habits of the Belgian police from his time of reconnaissance to consider the possibility of doing real time to be extremely low.

  “The guy came back and he thought, ‘Fat chance of anything because they never get any results anyway,’” she said. “It’s renowned around the world that the Belgian police are useless, with all due respect to Patrick [Peys] and Agim [De Bruycker].”

  Arrestees were rarely held for long periods in Belgium, which made such a calculated risk all the more reasonable. Typically, suspects were held for a maximum of six months unless evidence emerged of their involvement in new crimes or in an ongoing crime. This was why the court released Falleti on bail after six months of detention.

  Even in cases in which the evidence of a suspect’s guilt was overwhelming, as it was in this case, it was unusual for the courts to order the suspect detained until the start of the criminal proceedings. Since the heist was a one-time event, it seemed logical that a lawyer could have arranged for Notarbartolo’s release. That had been the basis for Damen’s nearly successful plea for bail in November 2004. The plea had been granted but then denied on appeal.

  In Oliver’s view, the judicial department took exception from the norm for Notarbartolo because the stolen goods hadn’t been recovered; suspicion of possessing stolen goods could constitute his ongoing participation in a crime. “That guy came back thinking, ‘What’s three [to six] months? I’ll be out and having a great life and [be] driving to Italy and seeing my wife and son and whatever,’” Oliver explained.

  From the prosecutors’ perspective, Notarbartolo was the ringleader because he was clearly involved on the deepest level. The prosecution team was determined to make someone pay for what had happened; it would have lowered their chances of getting the maximum penalty to admit any uncertainty they may have had regarding who organized the heist. In fact, the Italian investigation into the matter was ongoing, with detectives in Italy still trying to find out who was involved, even as the trial against the known suspects was underway.

  Damen and the other defense attorneys unsuccessfully argued for a further delay pending the outcome of the Italian investigation. Damen was especially interested in what would become of inquiries by the Anti-Mafia Brigade in Palermo, which had sent a unit of detectives to Belgium to question both Falleti and Notarbartolo about suspected ties to organized crime. Damen hoped the investigation could sow doubt about Notarbartolo’s role as the ringleader.

  Palermo, the capital of Sicily, is a well-known hub for drugs entering Europe from South America and Afghanistan, and investigators knew that Notarbartolo’s family hailed from there. While Notarbartolo also had an uncle with Mob ties that the authorities asked him about, it was his cousin Benedetto Capizzi they were interested in. Anti-Mafia police had once photographed Notarbartolo while he attended the wedding of Capizzi’s son in Palermo. Additionally, Notarbartolo made calls while in prison to Capizzi’s wife.

  Capizzi was the alleged head of the Villagrazia area of Palermo at the time and was later selected to be the boss of bosses for Cosa Nostra. In December 2008, police arrested Capizzi, along with almost a hundred other suspects, to prevent a bloodbath as another Mafia faction had its own ideas for who should be the new head of the entire Sicilian Mafia.

  The anti-Mafia investigators theorized that the Mob had sponsored the heist to finance a drug operation but their investigation eventually went nowhere.

  The judges decided not to wait for the Italians to finish their work, ruling that the results wouldn’t change the materiality of the evidence against the defendants. After the trial, the defendants’ Italian attorneys claimed that this was one of the ways in which their clients’ rights had been violated: by rushing to court before the Italian investigation was complete.

  On March 17, 2005, Damen tried another tactic: arguing that his client would not be able to get a fair trial as a result of investigators’ cooperation with the media, namely Primetime Live. Millions of viewers in the United States had watched “The Great Diamond Heist.” The decision by police officials to cooperate with the program sent shockwaves through the Belgian legal community, as the Belgian judicial system grants greater protection for the privacy interests of defendants, before or after conviction, than does the United States. In Belgium, there’s little belief in the public’s right to know about a pending legal case. Therefore, the Primetime Live show startled many people in that Peys and De Bruycker discussed actual evidence against the perpetrators. After an eternity of “no comments” to the media, they had appeared on TV to explain in detail how a high-profile crime had occurred and why they thought the defendants had done it.

  In court, Damen argued that the case against his client should be thrown out as the police had violated Belgian laws regarding the confidentiality of an open investigation and prejudiced the case against Notarbartolo. Though the Court of Appeal strongly disapproved of the police participation with ABC, it ruled that the program would not affect the case. Since the case would be decided by judges and not a jury, the court didn’t have to consider how the program might have influenced its members. The judges simply said they would base any decision solely on the case file and would ignore what was said on the program.

  On March 24, 2005, it was Jan De Man’s turn to argue Falleti’s case. He told the judges that Falleti had an innocent explanation for everything that the prosecution believed tied him to the crime: his prepaid phone, his role in carrying the rug out of the apartment, and other such details. He may have done those things, De Man said, but he didn’t know what he was doing; he hadn’t known anything about the crime. De Man argued that the prosecutors needed to prove that Falleti “knowingly” participated in the criminal conspiracy. The court agreed and the charges against Falleti were altered to specify that in order to be found guilty, it would have to be proven that he knew he was helping cover up a crime.

  On Thursday, May 19, 2005, after more than a month of hearings, the Court of Appeal rendered its decision. The court convicted four of the defendants, only one of whom was in the courtroom. Leonardo Notarbartolo was sentenced to ten years in jail and fined 1 million. If he did not pay the fine, then he faced an additional three months in jail. The other convictions were for the three defendants who were still safe in Italy.

  It had seemed, briefly, that these three might get off on a technicality. In D’Onorio’s case, an Italian court had ruled that his DNA evidence had been obtained from his home illegally. D’Onorio’s lawyer, Patrick Kortleven, argued to the Belgian court that the DNA evidence against him was inadmissible for the same reason. The court agreed, but ultimately concluded that there was enough evidence against him without the DNA to support a conviction.

  Likewise, Finotto’s Italian lawyer, Monica Muci, later complained that the DNA evidence against her client shouldn’t have been brought up in court at all because the laboratory testing had been done without a defense expert present. The method used to test the DNA had destroyed the sample, so Finotto’s defense team didn’t have a chance to perform an independent comparison. In the end, Muci claimed Finotto was railroaded. She was the same attorney who had convinced an Italian appeals court to overturn his conviction for the 1997 bank robbery attempt by arguing that Finotto was only casing the bank, not attempting to rob it.

  Arguments about the DNA during the trial went nowhere, and Finotto, D’Onorio, and Tavano were each sentenced to five years in jail and fined 5,000.

  In addition to the jail time, the court ordered all four convicted defendants to pay a total of more than 4.5 mil
lion to the diamond merchants they had robbed. In the Belgian system, civil plaintiffs could participate in a criminal proceeding to recover the value of items stolen from them. Seventy-five victims were reported altogether; not everyone who was robbed elected to be part of this case. Of these, thirty plaintiffs had only a single euro awarded to them to indicate that, while they were owed money, the amount of that money had yet to be determined.

  Notarbartolo began serving his term immediately, while the court promptly issued arrest warrants for the other three.

  When the three defendants in Italy heard that a court in Belgium had sentenced them to five years in jail each, they would have found the classic quote by Brendan Behan, the Irish writer and revolutionary, appropriate: “Court-martialled in my absence, sentenced to death in my absence. So I said, right, you can shoot me—in my absence.”

  The court cleared Antonino Falleti and Adriana Crudo. The prosecutors had asked the court to sentence them to eight months and eighteen months in jail, respectively, as well as a fine. There was not enough proof that they had knowingly attempted to cover up the crime, even though they had been helping to clear out the apartment that had been used as local headquarters for the heist.

  For Falleti, it was the end of a nightmare. He regretted the outcome for his friend, but the fact that he had been officially acquitted was too overwhelming to make him anything but ecstatic. Falleti, his wife, and his legal team went to a nearby café to celebrate with a few bottles of champagne. Jan De Man, the lawyer he’d found by yelling out of a cell window, clinked glasses and congratulated his client, but had a dire prediction for Notarbartolo. Typically, prisoners in Belgium only served a third of their sentence before they were considered for early release. De Man’s opinion was that Notarbartolo was so publicly reviled that he’d do every day of his ten years, which, when counting time served, would see him released in 2013. Notarbartolo would be sixty years old.