by Scott Selby
In the context of the Wired article, Notarbartolo didn’t name any of the men who were in on the plot, but referred to three of them as The Genius, The Monster, and Speedy. Considering the traits of the others arrested for the crime, these aliases clearly referred to D’Onorio, Finotto, and Tavano, respectively. To those familiar with the case, it was as if a fat man, a redhead, and a tall guy had been convicted of robbing the Diamond Center and Notarbartolo attempted to disguise their identities by calling them Chubby, Carrot Top, and Stretch.
There was another man involved whom Notarbartolo referred to as the King of Keys. Those familiar with the School of Turin knew that Aniello Fontanella’s nickname was the Wizard with the Keys, and Giovanni Poliseri’s were John the Tunisian and the King of Thieves. The character in Notarbartolo’s tale was further described, in Davis’s words, as an “older” man who “looked like somebody’s grandfather,” which was suggestive of Poliseri. Fontanella was in his mid-fifties at the time, the same general age as the rest of the School of Turin. Poliseri, on the other hand, was almost seventy at the time of the heist.
According to Notarbartolo’s tale, the accomplices—who, with the exception of Speedy, Notarbartolo had supposedly never met before he was introduced to them in the replica vault—committed the robbery while he waited outside in a car all night. This contradicts evidence presented in court that showed Notarbartolo’s phone was in use inside the Diamond Center on the night of the heist. Also, Notarbartolo claimed that “they worked in the dark” although the article did not explain why. But this detail is contradicted by the primary eyewitness: Jorge Dias De Sousa, the concierge who discovered the crime, reported to the diamond detectives that the lights were turned on in the vault and the foyer when he discovered the crime Monday morning. He confirmed that detail to the authors during a telephone interview.
Notarbartolo needed the vault to be dark for the crux of his tale to make any sense at all: he claimed that because of the darkness alleviated (solely when the thieves “turned on their flashlights only for split seconds—enough to position the drill over the next box” producing “muffled flashes”), they couldn’t closely examine what they were stealing. The diamantaires kept their goods in “leather satchels,” Notarbartolo said, so they stole those without bothering to look inside them. (The assertion that the vault was plunged into darkness the whole time also provides a reason for there to have been an expensive full-scale duplicate made of the vault, since the men would have needed to practice navigating it while blinded.)
Notarbartolo said it was only when he and the others opened the satchels back at the apartment, to find them empty, that they realized they’d been double-crossed by the Jewish diamantaire. Notarbartolo believed the diamantaire must have alerted his cohorts to empty their leather satchels of diamonds and then claim to have been robbed in order to collect an insurance payout, while still retaining their original goods.
Notarbartolo’s scenario is unlikely at best. If, as he claimed, the School of Turin only made off with about 20 percent of the lowest estimated figure of what was stolen during the heist, this would mean that about fifty to sixty tenants had to be in on the plot. These tenants not only had to conspire together without anyone catching wind of it—or without getting cold feet or suffering a guilty conscience—but they had to be okay with exposing fellow tenants who weren’t part of this criminal cabal to suffer huge losses. Heist victim Fay Vidal likened this suggestion to the conspiracy theory that Jews who worked in the World Trade Center stayed home on September 11, 2001, because they had foreknowledge of the terrorist attacks.
According to the story recounted to Wired, the mysterious financier never showed up at the appointed rendezvous back in Italy. As a result, Notarbartolo claimed, he and the others got off with “only” the $20 million in diamonds they’d gotten from those unlucky enough not to have been tipped off about the heist in advance, not the $100 million-plus reported in the press.
The story Notarbartolo told to Wired was remarkable, and it would have been even more so if it were true. However, mistakes, inconsistencies, and logical lapses throw the entire account into question. One contradiction is a scene at the beginning of the article that depicts a detective talking on his cell phone inside the vault, while part of Notarbartolo’s tale depends upon the fact that there was no cell phone reception on the vault-level floor, let alone inside the vault itself. But other dubious assertions made the tale even less credible. For example, diamantaires don’t usually keep their goods in leather satchels as Notarbartolo described. Diamonds are kept primarily in diamond papers and those packages are kept in whatever container is most handy at the moment, whether it’s a $4,000 briefcase or a $1 piece of Tupperware. A simple glance at the crime scene photos—which depict dozens of bags, purses, and drawers scattered pell-mell on the floor—shows that diamantaires didn’t care where they stored their diamonds as long as it was inside a safe deposit box. Moreover, if the thieves had taken a bunch of leather satchels, it’s strange that these empty satchels were never found. None were recovered from the trash left in the Floordambos.
The chaos left on the floor, incidentally, also casts doubt on Notarbartolo’s claim that the men worked in the dark and didn’t bother opening their packages to discover there were no diamonds. Fay Vidal’s own experience contradicts this part of Notarbartolo’s story: when her box was looted, every item in a small package of trinkets was stolen with the exception of the one piece that could be traced back to her, a gold medallion engraved with the name of her daughter. Clearly, there was a selection process happening in the vault. “They did not take [that] because they couldn’t do anything with it,” Vidal said. “The rest of what was in the little bag they took. What they did was open everything and look inside and see what they wanted. What they wanted, what they could easily sell, they took.”
In addition to numerous inconsistencies with known facts, there were also elaborately woven—and highly implausible—explanations for certain aspects of the crime that Notarbartolo seemed to have dreamed up purely with Hollywood in mind. For example, he told Wired that he rigged up a James Bond-style miniature video camera over the vault door to capture an image of the key stamp so the School of Turin’s locksmiths could make a duplicate, as well as to record the combination as it was entered on the dial.
As detailed in an earlier chapter, the use of a video camera has never been ruled out, but Notarbartolo’s explanation of how the thieves utilized a camera seems particularly far-fetched. The School of Turin’s locksmiths would indeed have to be wizards to duplicate a three-dimensional double-bitted vault key based on a one-dimensional video still. In order to film the combination, the camera would have had to somehow overcome the considerable security precautions designed into the vault to prevent just that. Specifically, the dial was hooded so that the numbers could be viewed only through a small window covered by a magnifying lens, meaning they were only visible at a precise focal length. According to the article, Notarbartolo hid the camera “directly above [the concierge’s] head.” To see the numbers from that angle, the camera would have to have been capable of filming through the head of the concierge, which would have obscured the view as he bent over to view the numbers through the small window.
What made the claim about the video camera even more preposterous was the explanation of where its recording equipment was stored. “Nearby, in a storage room beside the vault, an ordinary-looking red fire extinguisher was strapped to the wall,” the article read. “The extinguisher was fully functional, but a watertight compartment inside housed electronics that picked up and recorded the video signal.”
In order to accomplish this, Notarbartolo would have not only had to rig a video camera over the door, while in full view of the foyer’s CCTV surveillance camera, but he would also have had to sneak a “fully functional” fire extinguisher down to the vault level and place it in the adjacent storage room, which was locked, without anyone noticing. In order to watch the footage, he would have to
sneak it out again. The fire extinguisher, incidentally, would have been clandestinely smuggled in and out of the same locked storage room that the thieves later had to break open with a crowbar.
Notarbartolo told Wired that when entering the building on the night of the heist, the thieves ignored the garage and instead used a ladder they’d stashed behind the Diamond Center to climb up to a second-story terrace on the back of the building. There, they used a full-sized “polyester shield” to approach and mask an infrared detector, then disabled a window alarm and crawled through the window in order to breach the building.
If this were true, it would mean the thieves either colluded with Jorge Dias De Sousa (the head concierge) or they were remarkably lucky not to encounter him, since the second story terrace on the back of the building is part of Jorge’s private apartment. Jorge told police he’d returned from a night of visiting family while the heist was taking place. So, for Notarbartolo’s story to be correct, Jorge would have had to return to his apartment and fail to notice a ladder leaning on the balcony, a polyester shield covering the IR detector, or the tampered window through which the thieves entered the building. He then would have had to have slept so soundly that he didn’t hear three or four men burdened with a power inverter, an automotive battery, a bagful of drills and tools, a satchel of diamonds weighing at least forty pounds, another bag with more than thirty pounds of gold, and an untold volume of jingling gems and jewels as they nimbly—and apparently soundlessly—went out a window to Jorge’s balcony and then escaped down a ladder.
This scenario also conveniently ignored that detectives found a homemade key amid the debris dumped in the Floordambos that only worked on one door: the door leading from the parking garage into the building via C Block.
Patrick Peys, after reading the Wired article, weighed the possibility that the infiltration of the Diamond Center could have happened as Notarbartolo said it did.
“What he says is theoretically possible,” he began, going on to clarify, “I regard it the same as if he’d said ‘we landed on the roof with a helicopter.’ If you ask me if that’s technically possible, I would say yes. Would they have done it? No. If you relate that part of his story to the rest of what he told, I would put it under the same name. And I name it bullshit.”
Peys said “the biggest bullshit I’ve ever heard” was the claim of a double cross for the sake of running an insurance scam. “We know that very few victims were insured,” he said. “Where is the scam?”
In fact, many of those who were robbed did not specify a loss on police reports—and therefore couldn’t file an insurance claim—because they didn’t know what was in their safe deposit boxes when the heist occurred.
Most in the Diamond District shared Peys’s reaction, said the Antwerp World Diamond Centre’s Philip Claes. When they heard about Notarbartolo’s inside job conspiracy, people “laughed it off,” he said.
“Everybody knew that it was nonsense, that it was just a story to get some media attention,” Claes said. “But people were not very upset with it because everybody knows that it was so ridiculous. Some people were insulted, but generally people were thinking, ‘Oh really, is that it? Poor guy.’ Nobody is going to buy this. Everybody knows that it did not happen in this way.”
Overall, Notarbartolo’s story was a self-serving concoction in which he admitted guilt in only the most minimal way. Everything from the planning and the execution of the heist to the scale of the take and the mistakes that led to his capture was someone else’s fault. As Peys said, “I really do understand his point of view because he wants to put the blame on everyone else.”
Notarbartolo’s story only makes sense when one works backwards from what he would have wanted to accomplish with it. When he reached out to Davis and these authors in 2008, Notarbartolo may have known, or at least suspected, that he would qualify for early release in 2009. Belgian inmates rarely serve their entire sentences and Notarbartolo had already been imprisoned longer than the average convict, who, if he behaves well, can expect to be released after serving about a third of his sentence. Notarbartolo needed to spin his story into something that would make him money once he was released in early 2009.
Since he’d been convicted and incarcerated for the crime, it was pointless to claim he wasn’t involved. But he needed to keep secret the involvement of anyone the police didn’t already know and any elements of the heist that were not already documented. Based on his story, it was clear that he also didn’t intend to take responsibility for any mistakes. In addition to blaming Tavano for the shoddy disposal of the trash, Notarbartolo said that his granddaughter had silenced his phone while playing with it. Therefore, he had no idea the Italian police raided his home in Trana while he was en route to Antwerp, otherwise he wouldn’t have walked into the arms of the police by returning to the Diamond Center on the night he was arrested. However, this scenario ignores that Tonino Falleti successfully called Notarbartolo’s cell phone that day for directions to the Charlottalei apartment.
Another important goal of the story was to minimize how much loot he’d gotten away with. The more money Notarbartolo was believed to have, the more of a target he would be both for the authorities and for other criminals looking to extort money from him.
Lastly—and perhaps most importantly to Notarbartolo—he needed to make the story exciting enough that Hollywood would be interested in it. Throwing in a double cross by a conniving diamantaire and a duplicate vault like in Ocean’s Eleven would be just the trick. Despite his untold ill-gotten riches, he still had a desperate need for legitimate money so that he could openly spend it without attracting the attention of the authorities. The film world was just the ticket.
At least two of Notarbartolo’s accomplices were upset that he implicated them in the crime by talking to Wired. Tavano sent a hand-written letter to the authors of this book from his Italian prison cell, in response to an inquiry seeking his comment about the portrayal of Speedy in Wired. He denied any involvement in the heist, and called Notarbartolo’s version of events a “fairy tale” based on “lies” and “inventions.”
Likewise, as for the evidence against him, D’Onorio claimed he was the victim of tragic coincidences. He said he met Notarbartolo at a security conference in Milan, at which point Notarbartolo asked him about installing a security camera system in his office at the Diamond Center. D’Onorio said he told Notarbartolo that he had a client in Brussels, so the side trip to Antwerp wouldn’t be a problem. He visited the Diamond Center only to consult with Notarbartolo, he said. Regarding his DNA found on a piece of duct tape used to mask the security cameras in the vault, D’Onorio said he must have left a roll of tape in Notarbartolo’s office during the consultation and that Notarbartolo later used the tape in the commission of the crime. In all, he said he was nothing more than a “scapegoat” because of his past troubles with Italian authorities.
D’Onorio was upset that he was identified as The Genius in the Wired article. D’Onorio benefited from early release and found himself back home in Latina by January 2009. Speaking with the authors by phone in late spring 2009, he said he was at first angry that Notarbartolo fingered him as The Genius. But that changed when he talked with Notarbartolo, who claimed that Davis, the reporter from Wired, was the one responsible for identifying him. D’Onorio claims that The Genius had never been found and is still on the loose.
Detectives and criminals weren’t the only ones who were skeptical. A month after publishing Notarbartolo’s account of the crime, Wired printed a letter to the editor that asked, “Who, exactly, is supposed to be fooled by this silly tale? You expect us to believe that . . . these same guys wouldn’t realize that leather pouches supposedly full of diamonds are actually empty? It sounds like Notarbartolo used his time in jail to dream up the script for an Ocean’s Eleven prequel. He must be hoping that George Clooney will play him.”
The magazine printed a response that read, “Wired doesn’t make this stuff up; we even employ a siz
able crew of researchers to keep things truthy [sic]. Still, some of you found Joshua Davis’ article hard to believe.”
Among the ways Wired keeps its articles “truthy,” according to Articles Editor Mark Robinson, is to verify quotes with sources. Robinson said the magazine’s researchers verified with Notarbartolo that Davis had properly transcribed what Notarbartolo told him. And acknowledging the possibility that Notarbartolo was himself less than honest, Robinson points to the very end of the story, where Davis wonders if he was lied to.
“It’s true that significant parts of the article do rely on Notarbartolo’s version of events,” Robinson wrote in an e-mail to the authors. “But as the article itself repeatedly reminds readers, Notarbartolo could have been lying.” He later added, “Notarbartolo’s claims were checked when it was possible to check them.”
However, the article contains no quotes or statements casting doubt on Notarbartolo’s claims from Peys, De Bruycker, or Denice Oliver (all of whom were quoted on other matters). The article also lacks other sources that could have raised legitimate questions as to the veracity of his tale. Anyone in the diamond business could have cast doubt on Notarbartolo’s Jewish conspiracy theory, if only they had been asked if it was common to keep diamonds in leather satchels. One doesn’t have to be a storied crook (or a crook at all) to find it outlandish that a gang like the School of Turin would have spent so much time and effort to rob the Diamond Center without taking a few seconds to verify they were stealing diamonds and not empty bags.
Peys and De Bruycker were surprised by what they read in Wired. In an e-mail, Peys wrote, “From what we read, most of what [Notarbartolo] is stating is absolutely wrong.”
De Bruycker said the diamond detectives have been trying to distance themselves from the article since it was published. “We participated in that thing, but we certainly take—how can I say?—distance from the theories that Joshua Davis makes about the interviews he did with Notarbartolo,” De Bruycker said. “Certain theories that he makes in his article are things that don’t come from us. That’s his account.”