Flawless: Inside the Largest Diamond Heist in History (21 page)

It took a few hours to account for all that they’d stolen and to repack it into several bags that would be divided for the trip back to Italy. Notarbartolo marveled at everything they had to take from the apartment. Not only were there several bags of priceless loot, but he’d packed most of his personal belongings as well. He made himself a sandwich from the bread and salami left over from Finotto’s shopping trip, ate all but a few bites of his sandwich and threw the rest in the kitchen trash can.

They faced a long drive back to Italy; Notarbartolo was going southwest through France, while other thieves were heading east through Germany, and some toward Brussels and the airport. Since no one in Antwerp knew where Notarbartolo lived (his apartment wasn’t listed on his lease at the Diamond Center and he paid his rent in cash), they could have rested for a bit before heading out.

When they were ready to go, the little elevator in the Charlottalei apartment building made numerous trips to and from the seventh floor that day as the men emptied the apartment of anything related to the heist and loaded it into their cars. Transporting the luggage to the cars was no problem, but it looked a little suspicious when they began filling one of the cars with teeming garbage bags.

The heist had produced a lot of waste. They threw away the tools and equipment along with the loot they didn’t want to take with them, including diamonds that they deemed not worth trying to sell, the emerald pointers, and the obscure currencies. They also threw their rubber gloves and the stolen security tapes (all of them dismantled with their tape unspooled) into garbage bags to be brought to the cars.

As an afterthought, on the way out the door, someone also grabbed the household garbage in the kitchen trash can. They had reused the bag from Finotto’s trip to the Delhaize supermarket, still containing the receipt, as a trash bag. He stuffed that bag, a white plastic shopping bag emblazoned with the Delhaize logo, a black and red design featuring the stylized image of a lion, into one of the larger bags. In all, there were four large black plastic bags that filled the trunk and back seat of one of the cars.

They said their farewells without a hint of mistrust that one of them would be tempted to vanish before they could properly divide the loot, a task they would do Monday in a location far removed from their usual haunts around Turin. In a movie, this would be the point where a conniving double-cross would occur, but many of these men knew each other from childhood. They knew each other’s wives and children. And as much as they were thieves, they considered themselves men of honor. It’s true that they had just wiped out scores of businesses and destroyed the livelihoods of innocent strangers, but there was nothing personal about it. Stealing from faceless strangers was one thing; stealing from a trusted colleague was quite another.

They went their separate ways, knowing all they needed to do was drive cautiously and arrive at the rendezvous point on time before they could say that they’d gotten away with the biggest job they—or anyone—had ever pulled.

Only one of them needed to make a final stop before he was free to escape from Belgium: the driver heading toward the Brussels airport, about thirty minutes to the south, had to find a place to dump the garbage where it would never be found. Just a few exits from the airport, with the jets clearly visible as they took off and banked over the Belgian capital, he found what looked to be the perfect place.

Chapter Nine

ONE MAN’S TRASH IS ANOTHER MAN’S TREASURE

“They always call it ‘the crime of the century,’ but it never is.”

—Lodovico Poletto,
La Stampa
reporter

At a quarter past six on Monday morning, Jorge Dias De Sousa began his weeklong shift as the caretaker on duty. Though the previous night had been a late one—he’d returned to his apartment in the Diamond Center at three a.m.—he didn’t have the luxury of sleeping in. His duties began a bit earlier than usual, as he had to open the garage to let in maintenance men who were there to do some work on the building. Thirty-five minutes later, he got into the elevator and pushed the button for -2 to unlock the vault for the day, just as he’d done countless times before.

Expecting darkness in the foyer, he was instead surprised to find the lights on. That was easy enough to dismiss as an oversight by Jacques Plompteux, who could have forgotten to turn them off when he locked the vault on Friday night. “The lights were on,” Jorge recalled later. “Normally the lights are turned off in the evenings. I was thinking Jacques was there first [so] I called him, I called his name.”

There was no answer, but as soon as he turned to face the vault, Jorge knew Jacques had nothing to do with the lights being left on. “The safe was open,” Jorge said. “When I walked in the safe, I saw everything on the floor.”

The room was a disaster of open deposit boxes and discarded bags, jewelry pouches, and attaché cases. The storage room door was cracked and ajar; the magnetic alarm that was supposed to be attached to the vault door instead dangled freely from its wiring.

Like all of the School of Turin’s victims before him, Jorge understood what it was like to not believe his own eyes. As puzzlement turned to panic, he could not comprehend how what he was seeing was possible. No one should have been able to break into the building’s impregnable vault, but that it had happened he couldn’t deny. The Diamond Center had been robbed. Jorge called the police and the building manager, Julie Boost.

Phones began ringing from one end of Antwerp to the other, a chain reaction that soon had the entire Diamond District buzzing. The first to react were the uniformed police, who ran from their nearby substations, and the sight of cops zeroing in on the Diamond Center sent word rippling outward from every diamantaire they passed along the way that something big had happened. News of a heist was like word of a neighborhood fire: Everyone scrambled to see if they or someone they knew was affected. Before long, the street outside the Diamond Center was clogged with a mob of policemen, journalists, traders, Diamond Center tenants, and curious onlookers.

Philip Claes, a lawyer for the Antwerp World Diamond Centre who would go on to become its secretary general in 2008, found the area in front of 9–11 Schupstraat mired in chaos and confusion. “People were making gestures, they were surprised and astonished by what happened,” he said. “A lot of people were in shock because their safes were opened. For a lot of people all of their belongings were in the safes . . . Yeah, it was gone. It had disappeared and people just couldn’t understand what happened, how it was possible.”

The Diamond District police immediately called the federal detectives on the diamond squad, who were just starting their day. A heist trumped any other plans they had; like firemen responding to a five-alarm blaze, they dropped what they were doing, grabbed their coats and car keys, and sped through the streets with blue lights flashing and sirens wailing. They covered the short distance from their headquarters to the Diamond Center in record time.

Insurance investigator Denice Oliver was also among the first to get an urgent phone call about the heist. She arrived shortly after the initial pandemonium, and quickly learned from tenants that Jorge was distraught. Since neither Julie Boost nor Marcel Grünberger had been at the building when the heist was discovered, Jorge was the senior staff member on site. He was so upset that he let several tenants into the vault to see for themselves what had happened—a misstep for a crime scene that should have been cordoned off. A rumor circulated quickly among the tenants, putting at least part of the blame on the shoulders of Jorge, who wasn’t even on duty the weekend the crime took place. When she arrived at the Diamond Center, Oliver heard from some of the tenants that Jorge admitted keeping the key stamp attached to the pipe and not clearing the code from the combination dial. “Apparently, he had memory problems, and he would go in and lock up the vault room door,” Oliver said, “but he didn’t enter the code and [he] put the key in a box off in the side room . . . He was like a headless chicken down there.”

Though it sounded hard to believe, such practices were more common than might be imagined. According to safe makers, it was not unusual for safe owners to pick codes that were easy for them to remember, like birthdays or to mutter the combination out loud as they dialed it in, even in the presence of strangers. And it wasn’t unheard of for them to skip clearing the code from the dial for the sake of speed and convenience.

Fay Vidal, one of the tenants whose box had been broken into and robbed, heard the same thing from one of the police detectives. She was shocked at how carelessly her treasures—and those of the other tenants—had been guarded. “Our dear Jorge, being one lazy S.O.B., decided that it was much too much work to put in that combination every morning,” she said. “So [when locking the door for the night], he just turned the key and left the combination . . . I don’t know if he did it always, I wasn’t there, it’s not me, but that’s what I heard from the inspector.”

What these accusations fail to take into account was that it was Jacques, not Jorge, who last locked the vault before the heist, something Jorge himself was quick to point out when discussing this accusation years later. “Not me,” he said, “because that week I was not on duty. It was my colleague that closed the safe, do you understand? I never, in fourteen years that I am here, forgot to clear the combination . . . You’re used to doing that, it’s automatic.”

As for whether Jacques was as careful, Jorge couldn’t say. “Jacques, I don’t know,” he said. “I can’t speak about that . . . That’s possible of course [that he didn’t clear the combination], but I don’t know that.”

Tenants’ ire may have been directed at Jorge because he was the head caretaker and so was responsible for setting the standards for those he supervised or perhaps simply because he was there that morning. If there were an unwritten policy that it was acceptable to only partially secure the door, it would have applied to Jacques as well as to Jorge.

By the time the diamond detectives arrived, they found a crime scene that was being explored by dumbstruck civilians and a hysterical concierge. Only when Boost arrived did Jorge get hold of himself, and he did so by following his boss’s orders to keep his mouth shut.

The detectives, led by Agim De Bruycker and Patrick Peys, took control. They cleared everyone out of the vault and began their investigation. It would take a while before they learned the scope of the heist—their first task was to figure out what the building’s security features and policies were, as only then could they understand what measures the thieves had bypassed—but they could tell from a glance that it was a professional job. They couldn’t help but admire the simple ingenuity of the Styrofoam on the motion detector and the tape on the light sensor.

Given that the vault door had been opened without being damaged, the detectives first thought this had to be an inside job. They called for Paul De Vos, the locksmith who had installed the vault more than thirty years before, to examine the door and explain how it worked.

The vault buzzed with activity. Two forensic technicians dressed in white head-to-toe Tyvek outfits like those used to handle hazardous waste dusted for fingerprints. They gingerly picked through the debris on the floor, changing rubber gloves after handling each item to avoid accidentally transferring any DNA that might be on one to another. They collected bits of adhesive tape, the shrouding material blinding the cameras, the tools left behind by the thieves, and the discarded water bottles. Among the many items from the safe deposit boxes littering the floor of the vault were ledgers of diamond transactions. Since the detectives were trained to spot schemes to trade diamonds on the black market, they quickly realized these could hold the key to more crimes than just the heist. Considering the scale of the robbery, however, the detectives decided to ignore any evidence of black diamond transactions they found. Their priority was to try to solve the heist, not add a further layer of misery to those who’d been robbed by looking into whether they’d evaded taxes. “We spoke about it with [the investigating judge assigned to the case, similar to a district attorney] and he agreed with us that it wasn’t the appropriate time to take advantage of what happened,” Peys recalled. “So we didn’t.”

Besides potentially incriminating ledgers, the vault floor contained numerous treasures. “I can assure you that whatever was left regarding valuables, if it would have been ours, the six of us, we didn’t have to work anymore,” Peys said. “At that moment it was very difficult and very important that we could return all of those belongings to the right owner. To retrieve them wasn’t the problem, they were lying there on the ground, but who is the owner? That was a major difficulty at that moment. You have some diamonds or jewelry that are easily recognizable and nobody’s going to discuss about it, but some kind of diamonds or money or whatever, there might be a very serious discussion about [who owned] it. We found for example a bar of gold. Just like that. A bar of gold. No name on it, of course, so who is the owner of the bar of gold?”

To help sort it out, the detectives ordered a desk be set up in the foyer. They allowed tenants to descend to the vault level in groups to speak to investigators.

“The landing was full of people,” Vidal said of the scene outside the vault. “You had to come and give your name, safe number, and all that. Then there were three policemen inside the vault, each taking care of one person. We were queuing up outside after we’d given our name and one by one, they let somebody in and that person would then go to their own safe to see if it was opened or not.”

Those waiting for their turn in the vault were “decimated, destroyed,” according to Vidal’s description of the crowd that day. When she herself was led into the vault, she found that her small letterbox safe was open and empty except for some envelopes that contained nothing of value to the thieves. Everything else—gold trinkets from when her daughters were children, jewelry she’d inherited from her mother—was gone. She saw that the deadbolt was bent at about a 45-degree angle.

The detectives asked her to look around on the floor and see if there was anything she recognized as hers. It was an arduous task, like sifting through a landfill.

“The floor was littered that high, from one side to the other, with what they didn’t take,” Vidal said, gesturing with her hands to illustrate the clutter on the floor. “There were bags: plastic bags, travel bags, linen bags. People just put things into their safe with a bag. Then there were coupons, bonds, papers like that . . . There was jewelry on the floor as well.” She found nothing that was hers.

Tenants who were able to identify their belongings weren’t allowed to leave with them. The valuables were still considered evidence, so the police placed them in clear plastic bags, wrote the tenant’s name on the outside, and kept the property to sort out later, after the forensic team had a chance to examine the items.

Denice Oliver set up her own triage operation to begin the Herculean task of processing insurance claims and assembling a list of stolen goods. When she had heard that there had been “an incident,” as she called it, at the Diamond Center, she hadn’t been greatly surprised. She’d been in the building numerous times to visit clients, and although she had never been allowed to closely inspect its security measures, she hadn’t been impressed with what she saw. She had long ago dismissed the staff as inadequate; in fact, she didn’t consider the concierges who checked visitors in and out of the building to be legitimate security guards. On previous visits to the Diamond Center, she was amazed that she could take as much time as she liked wandering its halls, no questions asked. “Everything in that building was just so lax,” she said later.

While Oliver interviewed her clients and the police puzzled over how the thieves had penetrated the vault, Paul De Vos explained to detectives how the LIPS door operated. He had to draw a verbal picture of the two-part key because it couldn’t be found amid the debris on the floor. The detectives assumed the thieves had taken it with them. De Vos explained that he didn’t know the combination to the safe because he always averted his eyes when it was being reset, but he told them who did. Those people went to the top of the detectives’ list of suspects.

De Vos was also asked to examine the safe deposit box doors. Like the detectives, he couldn’t understand how the thieves had opened the safes. He knew that the faceplates were a weak point, but he didn’t think it was possible to pry the doors open. He took his time moving from one broken door to the next, examining each carefully. Then he noticed something strange about one of the unopened boxes, number 25: there was a sheered-off prong of metal protruding from the keyhole. He pointed it out to the detectives. They had their first clue as to how the thieves had opened the safe doors.