Marie Antoinette's Watch: Adultery, Larceny, & Perpetual Motion

by John Biggs

  One Saturday in July, 1959, a neighbor caught Na’aman riffling through a strongbox that held donations designated for Ein HaHoresh’s soldiers. The rest of the kibbutz was at a funeral for another soldier killed in a plane crash, and Na’aman had exploited their grief to enrich himself. After a unanimous vote, the kibbutz leaders expelled him from the settlement. The kibbutz lifestyle was all about trust, and for a son of the group to betray it to such a degree was almost unthinkable. One member remembered that the kibbutzim “almost lynched him on the spot.”

  In Israel, kibbutzim were close to national heroes. They consisted of small, dedicated groups, usually no more than two hundred members, living in relative isolation on Israel’s windswept plains and burning deserts. They were self-sufficient. Although now known for farming, they were the source of most of Israel’s early industrial efforts. Kibbutzim were Israel’s builders.

  Na’aman’s misbehavior wasn’t entirely unexpected. According to one contemporary, Yitzchak Baram, “Na’aman stole all the time. We called it petty theft. When he was in the army he had a girlfriend in Beit Lid and he would steal cars from the kibbutz to go visit her.” But innocent joyriding was a long way from wholesale larceny.

  Thrust out into the world for the first time, Diller’s plan was simple: to find wealth, no matter the price. Assessing him psychologically in 1967, Dr. Dov Alexandrovich would find that he had a “mental disorder that affects the thought process. Here is a person who shows early signs of schizophrenia.” Diller’s lawyer requested this psychological investigation, during his second arraignment for breaking and entering, in order to enter a plea of innocence due to insanity. But no one in Diller’s life remembers him taking any psychotropic drugs or exhibiting signs of mental illness—suggesting it might have been a dodge to avoid prosecution.

  This much was sure: Na’aman “felt inferior,” and he thought that money possessed an “omnipotent power” that could repair his life.

  In 1957, exiled from the kibbutz in disgrace, he vowed to change his life and moved in with an aunt in Tel Aviv. He was an intelligent young man with an IQ of about 130, which put him in the top 3 percent nationally.

  By 1960 he was working at Bank Leumi, Israel’s storied banking group, and going to school for accounting. Outwardly, he became a normal, well-adjusted young man headed for great things. He was, he said, looking for “a way to get ahead in life.” He spent time working at an insurance company and a Ministry of Education archive, trying to “prove his worth” by making more money. But the money never arrived, and by 1967 he was making other plans for his future. He had quit his job and was secretly being sent money by his mother. He still lived with his Aunt Hila and her husband Aryeh Reznik, a minor Israeli sculptor, in an apartment on Emanuel Avenue. He kept to himself.

  Tel Aviv in the 1960s was awash with change. New immigrants were arriving by the boat- and planeload and with them new methods for bilking the next wave. Gangsters from Russia were rolling through town, ensuring that smuggling and antiquities theft was rampant. It was the era of the suave cat burglar. Sean Connery’s James Bond was the most popular film character of the era, and his exploits in You Only Live Twice were breaking box-office records at the Hod Theatre in Tel Aviv. Albeit with a slightly criminal twist, it was on this image that many of Israel’s aspiring criminals modeled their wardrobes and methods. Na’aman was among them.

  Putting his military training to use, Na’aman had collected a number of plans and diagrams of buildings around Tel Aviv in his “operations log.” For years, he studied security systems and tested the fence and window bars at various landmarks. Even without professional experience, he began to understand the mindset of security professionals.

  Diller became interested – some would say obsessed – with health. He began losing his hair, and he blamed his diet. Becoming a vegan, he grew even thinner and became obsessed with cleanliness, showering at least twice a day. It was also during this time that he fell in love with a young woman named Nili Shamrat, whom Diller’s mother described as a “flower girl.” “I met Na’aman at a party and it was love at first sight,” Shamrat said years later. “The relationship was very, very vibrant and very strong. Na’aman actually was a very romantic person.” Shamrat had long, wavy hair and was Diller’s physical opposite. Whereas Na’aman, the former soldier, was all angles and corners, Nili was skinny yet vivacious, a picture of health and intellect. She knew nothing of Na’aman’s past, and he kept it that way for years. She lived in Israel for a few years longer, but by 1980 had moved to the United States and out of Na’aman’s life. During these years, he lived the life of an ascetic, eating little, and planning.

  On October 8, 1967, a small story appeared on the ITIM news wire describing a foiled break-in in a northern suburb of Tel Aviv on Keren Kayemet Boulevard. The morning before, a neighbor had heard noises coming from number 47, a Halva’a Behisachon Bank branch with a vault in the basement. A window in back led to an empty field. Arriving there at around 8 a.m., Sergeant Eliezer Merhavi and Constable Ronnie Chandler found the grate over the window broken. They pulled it back, and Nadler, the smaller of the two, climbed through.

  Inside, the bank was dark and quiet. Chandler moved quickly and silently to the vault, where he found a surprising sight: a man-sized hole cut straight through six inches of steel. Nadler moved through the hole, his gun drawn, and received a face full of tear gas.

  Blind and staggering, Chandler fell forward onto the man inside the room. He began to grapple him with him and, although he could barely see anything, Chandler, a “champion featherweight boxer,” began throwing tight punches at the burglar’s face. The burglar pulled a pistol from his jacket and fired once. At the sound of the report, Merhavi ran down the hall to help his partner just as the burglar was coming out of the vault.

  In the fight that followed, Merhavi pulled his gun and shot the burglar in the foot. The man lay wounded and blinded from residual tear gas, as the policemen called for back-up and rounded up the thief’s gear—canvas sacks full of hammers, chisels, lock picks, and, more importantly, the loot he had just taken from the bank vault. In his wallet, they found a license for a late model Opel hatchback in the name of Na’aman Diller, age 28, late of Ein HaHoresh. In his car, parked a few blocks away, they found the contents of fifty safety deposit boxes, including $8,000 in cash and diamonds and jewelry worth a little over one hundred thousand dollars.

  Diller was transported to Ichilov Hospital, the first (but not last) time that he was driven away from a burglary site in an ambulance. The papers lapped up the story, dubbing him the “Kibbutznik burglar.”

  Diller’s preparations for the robbery had begun five months earlier, when he started digging a shallow ditch from a small shack along nearby Be’er Tuvya street, a tiny circular road accessible only though a copse of trees. He ran the ditch through an empty courtyard, digging slowly and carefully and even leaving hazard barriers up when he went home at night. He wore postal service overalls as he dug and told anyone who inquired that he was “testing some wires.”

  Into this ditch, over the next few weeks, he began laying a 164-foot length of iron pipe and two wires in sections. The pipe stopped at the barred rear window of the bank. Diller worked slowly, steadily, and with great precision. His goal was to become part of the scenery, a normal worker with a normal job to do. Then, at the end of May, the army called Diller up to fight in the Six Days War, and he had to set his project aside, half-finished. For the next two months, he bristled under military order and discipline, itching to return to his work.

  By July, he was out of uniform and back in his ditch. He had hidden the pipe under a load of dirt and capped the ends before he left. The plants in the courtyard had, by now, grown over most of the work site. He resumed his slow, methodical labor, appearing to all the world to be a lone member of a road crew forced by his higher ups to perform the unglamorous job of ditch digging. Finally, by October, he had crossed the field, leaving a small length of pipe and cable sticking
out of the ground.

  He left for about a week, then returned on Wednesday, October 4, the eve of Rosh Hashanah. He was driving a stolen Ford Taunus Transit van, a globular-looking, German-made work van that was commonly seen cruising around Europe and Israel retrofitted as an ice cream truck in the late 1960s. He parked the van near the field and again went away. He returned on Friday the 6th at 11 o’clock in the morning.

  Jerusalem was quiet. Diller would have most of Friday and all of Saturday to work unobstructed, and he knew no one would be at the bank until Monday. He had the neighborhood to himself.

  Having cased the bank for months, Diller knew that the rear alarm was primitive and easy to shut off. He removed the grate from the back window, opened it, and climbed inside. He slowly brought in his tools, laying them out like a painter preparing his work area. Then he went back out the window, replaced the grate, and by noon was home, showered, and resting for his return in the evening.

  At eleven that night, he returned in his small Opel. He pulled a small canister of oxygen from the van – he had six in total – and connected it to the pipe. He then connected a battery to the leads and walked back to the window. He was carrying a canister of acetylene and a home-made oxy-acetylene torch. The battery wires would power his lighter and lamps. The oxygen flowed from the van to the back room through the buried pipe, ensuring he would not have to lug a set of extremely conspicuous canisters across the garden.

  The vault was protected by a six-inch thick steel door. He set about cutting through the metal a layer at a time, inching his way closer to the inside. Hours later, he had made a hole big enough to step through without trouble.

  Finally, he was inside. He quickly cut through three bank safes and pulled open fifty safe deposit boxes. He left with a bag full of loot, and later on Saturday morning he returned for more. By this time he had been working for forty-eight hours straight and he was exhausted. Faced with another set of safes, Diller began pounding at the locks with reckless abandon, assuming that everyone would be asleep. A neighbor, awoken by the banging, called the police.

  After months of careful planning and a six-month operation, Diller was foiled by his own impatience. When the tear gas cleared, police were convinced there had been multiple thieves, and that they had escaped. They served Diller with a search warrant at his bedside in Tel Aviv’s Ichilov Hospital and broke down the door to his small apartment. There, they realized the truth: Diller had acted alone. A library of books on welding and safecracking littered his sparsely furnished home. They found two live hand grenades taken from the Army reserve armory and foreign currency. They also found his operations log detailing the entire plan.

  As Diller lay handcuffed to a bed, he began to speak with a lawyer and a psychologist. The plan was to plead insanity, so Diller explained himself and his actions. The psychologist, Dr. Dov Alexanderovitz, interviewed him extensively and found that Diller was able to “maintain some kind of connection to reality. At the same time, because of his disorder, he is forced to give up on many areas of his life, including his sex life.” Instead, Diller explained, he gained a sort of pleasure from theft.

  “It’s something like the thrill of a man at a beautiful woman when he knows she could be his,” he said. “You’re tense, concentrated on an object you want to carry. You do not even need the thing you stole, you need only the excitement.”

  When word of his arrest trickled back to Ein HaHoresh, the kibbutz was outraged. They struck Diller’s name from the kibbutz registry, and argued over whether the kibbutz would help Arne Diller pay her son’s legal fees. In November, Na’aman’s mother took a one-year leave of absence in order to support her son as he stood trial in Tel Aviv. The psychiatric evaluation swayed the jury and slowly the punishment was whittled down to a few years in prison before being passed along to the judge.

  Around this time, Diller’s family changed their name to Lidor (a loose anagram) to disassociate themselves from the shanda of their black sheep. Na’aman also soon changed his last name to Lidor, and when the family later changed it back, he did too. Ultimately, this maneuver would allow him to keep and carry two passports, a useful tool for a cat burglar.

  In March of 1968 he was sentenced to four years in prison for the bank theft and disappeared behind bars. By all indications, he was a model prisoner, taciturn and obedient, and in February of 1971, he was released early for good behavior. He returned to Tel Aviv to live with his mother, and that same month was diagnosed with skin cancer.

  On July 17, 1971, another tiny item crossed the Itim wires. “Rubin paintings stolen from son,” the piece read. A dozen paintings had been taken from the home of Davi Rubin, son of Reuven Rubin, the famous Israeli painter whose early landscape work has been compared to Cezanne’s. His home at 14 Rehov Bialik had been ransacked over a weekend, and the neighbors had heard nothing. Rubin, who had been out of town, returned to find many of his father’s famous oils, including Flute Player and Landscape with Olive trees, gone. Also stolen were two Picasso etchings and a dove-shaped diamond pin that Reuven had made for his wife on their fortieth anniversary. Reuven Rubin, his son recalled, “never recovered and returned to the way he was before the burglary.” He grew sick with worry and died three years later.

  This theft seemed almost magical. The locked doors had not been forced or picked, and the house, except for the damage caused by the theft, held no clues. One morning after the burglary, however, David Rubin noticed one of the bars on a high window was askew. He dragged a chair to the window and tapped it. It moved and he found that it had been cut and wrapped in colored tape and smoothed over with dark putty. The police knew this to be a classic Diller move – he had admitted trying this trick, and it seemed Diller’s specialty was the difficult entrance and the easy-going exit.

  The police followed Diller for a few weeks, until on August 16 they spotted him in a stolen van with the wrong license plates. They stopped him, searched his home and van, and came up with a few of the Rubins’ etchings but none of the paintings nor the pin. While admitting that he had stolen the paintings, he refused to return them, saying that “he didn’t think it was necessary to have mercy on the wealthy Rubin, who had bank accounts in Switzerland.” The police also discovered that he had participated in or performed twenty-three robberies in the six months since his release from prison.

  Diller’s exploits became tabloid fodder, and in the scribbler’s imagination he became a Robin Hood, a postmodern “aristocratic burglar” and a “modern poet-philosopher” according to one writer, Uri Keisari. Diller’s ascetic attributes and careful planning were reminiscent of a warrior monk’s training, and many found it hard to hate a man who thumbed his nose at the bourgeois Israeli upper crust. In fact, the Kibbutznik burglar, said Keisari, was a victim “of bacteria from a disease that is spreading throughout the country. It is the disease of the quantity which is ruining the quality. The fenceless kibbutz is one of our last remaining fortresses. How long will these ideological monasteries last?”

  The official report on the theft was long and broad. The police accused Diller – now Lidor – of stealing license plates, breaking into a ministry office to steal and forge ID cards, stealing fur and jewelry from apartments in Tel Aviv and even forging checks using a faked stamp. All told, he had stolen nearly of half a million dollars in property, although his exact proceeds were not known. He stored his plunder in various abandoned vans under tarps around town, a set of mobile safety deposit boxes that kept the goods away from his home and mother. Photographs taken from a stand of trees show him walking away from one of his vans, his face firm but with a slight crease of a smile on his lips.

  During his trial, the defense brought in psychologists who claimed that Diller had a narcissistic and schizoid personality, albeit “one with very rich internal content and significant creative bonds, with the sensitivity of an artist.” In 1972, a judge sent him back to prison and required psychological evaluations throughout. He began to see Dr. Ephraim Lehman, an Israeli psycho
logist who later moved to Germany and with whom Diller prepared his own lawyer-less appeal. His motion was dismissed by a judge who found that Diller’s “ambition for superiority causes him to try to impose his will on society, and he does not accept its authority and laws.”

  Diller spent four more years in prison before again being released for good behavior. But this time, Nili Shamrat had grown tired of waiting and had left him, eventually marrying in the United States. He wrote that he missed her dearly: “One who I loved and planned on marrying, who continued to write beautiful letters to me during my second long incarceration, is gone and we could not turn the wheel backward when I was released.” He told his parents he wanted to study vegan medicine, a controversial branch of medicine that avoided all animal products and focused on herbs and plants.

  In the fall of 1977, Diller used his forgery skills to make a fake German passport. He made his own stamps from rubber blocks and wood and matched the inks, the typefaces, and photographic styles of other passports he had purchased or stolen. Using his phony passport, he travelled to Holland where, contrary to his stated intention to study medicine, he robbed an Amsterdam jewelry store. The Amsterdam police, being rather more proactive than their Israeli colleagues, grabbed him immediately and found a van nearby full of oxygen tanks. Although the Dutch authorities were at first confused by his passport, after running his fingerprints through Interpol they found that they had caught the notorious Diller. In fluid, slightly accented English and some Dutch, Diller explained that in a few short months he had completed eleven robberies and stolen four cars. He received another three years in prison.

  This cycle of contrition and sin continued unabated. He met a woman named Julia Vilda who was a Dutch Christian missionary—until then. (“When she met Diller,” Oded Janiv said later, “she was not a nun anymore.”) She had been assigned to his prison to bring prisoners to Jesus. Instead, Diller brought her to him. When he got out in 1980, he lived with her as she tried to help him continue his studies in vegan medicine. That same year, he stole a car near a group of police officers and in the ensuing chase he hit a tree and was knocked out cold and injured. The Dutch authorities, tired of the Israeli’s antics, sent him back to Jerusalem.