by Scott Selby
Flawless
Flawless
FLAWLESS
FLAWLESS
INSIDE THE LARGEST
DIAMOND HEIST IN HISTORY
SCOTT ANDREW SELBY
and GREG CAMPBELL
New York / London
[http://www.sterlingpublishing.com] www.sterlingpublishing.com
STERLING and the distinctive Sterling logo are registered trademarks of Sterling Publishing Co., Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Selby, Scott Andrew.
Flawless: inside the largest diamond heist in history / by Scott Andrew Selby and Greg Campbell.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4027-6651-0
1. Robbery–Belgium–Antwerp–Case studies. 2. Jewelry theft–Belgium–Antwerp–Case studies. 3. Diamond industry and trade–Belgium–Antwerp. I. Campbell, Greg. II. Title.
HV6665.B422003 S45 2010
364.16’287362309493222–dc22
2009040766
2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1
Published by Sterling Publishing Co., Inc.
387 Park Avenue South, New York, NY 10016
© 2010 by Scott Andrew Selby and Greg Campbell
Distributed in Canada by Sterling Publishing
c/o Canadian Manda Group, 165 Dufferin Street
Toronto, Ontario, Canada M6K 3H6
Distributed in the United Kingdom by GMC Distribution Services
Castle Place, 166 High Street, Lewes, East Sussex, England BN7 1XU
Distributed in Australia by Capricorn Link (Australia) Pty. Ltd.
P.O. Box 704, Windsor, NSW 2756, Australia
Manufactured in the United States of America
All rights reserved
Sterling ISBN 978-1-4027-6651-0
For information about custom editions, special sales, premium and
corporate purchases, please contact Sterling Special Sales
Department at 800-805-5489 or [email protected].
For Sweden:
The Land of Wild Strawberries and Dalahästar
—SCOTT ANDREW SELBY
For Rebecca and Turner
—GREG CAMPBELL
Map of the Diamond District
Map of the Vault
“Let us not be too particular. It is better to have old
second-hand diamonds than none at all.”
—Mark Twain
CONTENTS
A Note from the Authors
Prologue
Chapter One: The Trojan Horse
Chapter Two: The School of Turin
Chapter Three: Probing Missions
Chapter Four: Where the Diamonds Are
Chapter Five: The Plan
Chapter Six: Safeguards
Chapter Seven: My Stolen Valentine
Chapter Eight: The Heist of the Century
Chapter Nine: One Man’s Trash Is Another Man’s Treasure
Chapter Ten: Been Caught Stealing
Chapter Eleven: Checkmate
Chapter Twelve: The Trial
Chapter Thirteen: The Loot
Epilogue
Joint Acknowledgments
Appendix
Selected Bibliography
Notes
Index
About the Authors
A NOTE FROM THE AUTHORS
Researching and reporting on the 2003 Antwerp Diamond Center heist presented unique challenges. Most significantly, Belgium’s justice system is not tilted in favor of public disclosure. Court records, police reports, and other documents are not readily available in most instances, and it is illegal for police detectives to discuss their investigations with journalists. This is the only criminal case in which detectives were permitted to break with that protocol.
The story in these pages was assembled from many sources in several countries. Key documents were discovered in a variety of places, as if collected during a scavenger hunt, and interviews with important characters took place in locales ranging from seedy public parks and taverns to ultramodern prisons and ritzy diamond offices. Assembling this book has been much like assembling a puzzle, the pieces of which were found throughout Europe, sometimes in unlikely places. What emerged was not only a spectacular story about the heist of the century, but also a wide array of conflicting details, divergent opinions, and incongruous theories.
Most facts about the diamond heist are clear and indisputable. Others are less so. Even some detectives disagree about the precise course of events. We strove to present the most accurate representation of the crime as possible through deduction, logic, common sense, and triangulation of facts from reliable sources. Where there is a dispute as to what happened, it is noted in the text or in the endnotes.
With a crime such as this—one that produced equal parts awe and conjecture to the degree that it has achieved mythical proportions—it’s fitting that there remains some mystery as to precisely how it was pulled off. Only a small group of men know for sure, and to date not one of them has provided a full and credible explanation, if they’ve spoken about it at all.
Scott Andrew Selby and Greg Campbell
October 2009
PROLOGUE
Ali Baba expected to find only a dark and obscure cave; and was much astonished at seeing a large, spacious, well-lighted and vaulted room . . . He observed in it a large quantity of provisions, numerous bales of rich merchandise, piled up, silk stuffs and brocades, rich and valuable carpets, and besides all this, great quantities of money, both silver and gold, some in heaps and some in large leather bags . . . He took up at several times as much as he could carry, and when he had got together what he thought sufficient for loading his three asses, he went.
—The Arabian Nights
The white-tiled floor of the vault was littered with diamonds, pearls, emeralds, rubies, gold, and silver. Empty velvet-lined jewelry cases, cardboard cigar boxes, and tin-clasped metal containers lay amid sparkling gemstones of every imaginable cut, color, clarity, and carat. There were ancient heirlooms, gilded bond notes, a Rolex watch, and a brick of solid gold heavy enough to stub toes. Loose stones rolled and bounced like marbles as the detectives picked through the debris, their low gasps and whistles of amazement echoing softly in the bright underground chamber. Detective Patrick Peys thought that if he were to shovel it all up, pour it into any one of the empty and discarded containers scattered about, he would have enough wealth to finance a decadent retirement not only for himself but also for the five other detectives in his unit of specialized diamond-crime investigators.
Like everyone else who descended to the bottom floor of the Antwerp Diamond Center that day—Monday, February 17, 2003—Peys needed some time to process the enormity of what he saw. He was no stranger to audacious crimes committed—or at least attempted—in Antwerp’s high-security Diamond District, but he’d never seen anything like this.
By almost any measure, the safe room two floors underground was as impenetrable a fortress as any to be found in the tightly protected Diamond District. Its walls of brushed-metal safe deposit boxes, which stood pillaged of an amount of treasure yet to be calculated, were inside a room equipped with a light sensor, a motion detector, and an infrared heat detector. Each of the safe deposit boxes had been locked with a key and a three-letter combination known only to its owner, yet more than half of them now stood open and empty. The room itself was secured with a foot-thick, double-locked, bombproof steel door armed with a magnetic alarm, as well as a locked, gated inner door that could only be opened with a buzzer from the control booth on the main floor. Both of those doors stood wide open that morning, undamaged.
These physical barriers were only the caps
tone of the vault’s security. Over the weekend, when the crime occurred, the building had been sealed with heavy, rolling metal barriers that covered locked plate glass doors at the main entrance and heavy mechanical vehicle arms at the garage entrance. Closed-circuit television cameras monitored the building’s entrances, corridors, and elevators as well as the antechamber to the vault, the small foyer that the elevators opened into. The building itself was situated in the heart of one of the most secure square miles on Earth, within what insurance investigators called the Secure Antwerp Diamond Area, a three-block canyon of gray glass-and-concrete buildings as well defended against thieves as Fort Knox. The district was protected with retractable vehicle barriers at either end to prevent cars from entering—or leaving—and was blanketed from every possible angle by a multitude of video cameras. Those cameras were monitored around the clock by a dedicated, heavily armed police force whose sole job was to prevent theft. In fact, there was a police security booth only forty yards from the Diamond Center’s front entrance and, in the other direction, a full-service police station just around the corner.
In the Diamond Center’s main corridor two stories above the vault, panic gripped tenants who enumerated the contents of their safe deposit boxes to police officers and insurance investigators. One dealer lost a million dollars in cash alone. A woman who had inherited her husband’s box and its contents upon his death found herself suddenly destitute; the large gemstones and irreplaceable heirlooms left to her by her husband were meant to finance her remaining years, and now they were gone.
Peys looked down at the piles of wealth and debris scattered across the floor. What was rolling under his feet—those gems and jewels, those scattered and discarded riches, the individual treasures of the building’s tenants who had stored them in the vault under the reasonable assumption that they would be safer here than in any bank—were the items the thieves had left behind. They had robbed and ransacked more than they could carry.
The detective was momentarily overwhelmed by the scale of the heist. Someone had overcome all of these security measures and made off with an untold fortune of diamonds, jewelry, precious metals, and cash without tripping a single alarm or injuring anyone. Peys didn’t say it out loud—not at the moment, anyway—but he couldn’t help but be awed by the skill required for such a heist.
That thought was quickly followed by another, darker realization: whoever had pulled off this seemingly perfect crime would be impossible to find.
Flawless
Chapter One
THE TROJAN HORSE
Money isn’t everything. There’s also diamonds.
—Proverb
Leonardo Notarbartolo set the world’s greatest diamond heist into motion on a cold gray autumn day in 2000 with a smile and a polite “merci beau-coup,” as building manager Julie Boost granted him free reign of the place he planned to rob.
As far as she knew, Boost had simply signed a new tenant and filled another vacancy in the tower of offices at the Diamond Center, the largest office building inside Antwerp’s storied Diamond Square Mile. The blue-eyed Italian was disarmingly charming. He said he was a diamond merchant interested in renting an office in the diamond capital of the world to supply his local retail stores in Turin, Italy, and his jewelry design business in Valenza. From what Boost could see, he’d be a perfectly adequate tenant.
In fact, Notarbartolo didn’t plan to buy a single stone in Antwerp; he hoped to steal as many as he could carry.
Notarbartolo was prepared for whatever interrogation the building’s manager might have prepared for him. He was armed with official-looking documents and glossy brochures describing his modest chain of jewelry stores in Turin. In his attaché case, he carried examples of his handcrafted jewelry manufactured in Valenza—shiny bracelets, necklaces, and diamond rings that he’d designed himself. He was prepared to explain that his business was going so well, particularly on the manufacturing side, that it made sense to open an office in Antwerp, where 80 percent of all diamonds bought and sold throughout the world changed hands. Anyone who was serious about trading in diamonds did business in Antwerp—and, by extension, so too did anyone who was serious about stealing them.
If Notarbartolo aroused any suspicions during Boost’s first meeting with him, he allayed them by employing the most effective tools at his disposal: charm and good looks. At forty-eight, Notarbartolo was handsome, although he carried a few extra pounds and his dark hair was thinning. With his open and expressive face, he could evoke in complete strangers a warm feeling of brotherhood and kinship the moment the tiny lines around his mouth crinkled into a captivating smile. He acted as if everyone around him was an old and treasured friend. He had perfected the ability to melt defenses and subvert suspicion. And just as important, he had the skill to make you forget him within minutes—he was engaging, but only exactly as engaging as he needed to be for the task at hand. He didn’t want to create a lasting impression; for his purposes, it was better to be quickly forgotten. This was precisely why he had been chosen for this part of the job.
After Boost and Notarbartolo concluded their introductions, they embarked on a tour of the facility. As they strolled through the halls, Boost pitched the office building as a smart choice for a merchant like Notarbartolo. At the equivalent of about $500 a month, the rent was competitive. Smack in the heart of the Diamond District, the building was conveniently located within steps of any business or service one might require, including three diamond quality–certification businesses, an array of cutters and polishers, supply stores that sold everything from loupes to grinding wheels, the country’s import/export agency, and, of course, the wholesalers themselves. Belgium recorded tens of billions of dollars of transactions for both rough and polished diamonds every year; in the course of just an average day, some 200,000 carats were traded, representing a value of about $200 million. Practically every decent-sized stone ever mined made its way at some point through the Diamond District’s three city streets. Many of those diamonds—hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth—circulated among the offices at the Diamond Center.
Boost was a prim and petite woman, her short blonde hair done in an almost retro-looking no-nonsense poodle cut. She toyed with the eyeglasses hanging around her neck on a long gold chain as she recited the building’s amenities. None of it was news to Notarbartolo; he already knew everything she was selling him on, and he didn’t care at all about such details as the affordable rent. While he was in fact an Italian jeweler, it was cover for his true vocation: Notarbartolo was a renowned thief in Italy embarking on the most daring scam of his colorful career. As the tour wound through the building’s hallways, he was far more interested in the building’s security measures than its proximity to the conveniences of the diamond industry. He’d already started compiling a mental list of the things he observed long before Boost pointed them out.
The most obvious antitheft measure was the building’s video surveillance system. There had been no attempt to conceal the cameras positioned in the hallways; quite the opposite, they were made as obvious as possible to relay the message to anyone walking around that they were being watched. Notarbartolo had already seen the security control room filled with monitors displaying images of tenants coming and going—he and Boost passed it in the main corridor as they began their tour—but he couldn’t tell with a passing glance what sort of system it was. Did the cameras record digital images on a computer hard drive or onto videotape? The difference was critical, and it was just one of the many things he planned on learning with his newly acquired inside access.
They took the elevator to the fifth floor, Boost jingling a set of keys in her hand. They turned onto a narrow hallway with doors on both sides; these were private offices. Since each tenant had his own preference of video surveillance, the walls were festooned with different models of cameras that craned overhead like huge insects, each aimed at a doorway. These weren’t so much antitheft measures as they were a means for the office occupant
to see who was knocking at the door before deciding to let them in or not.
Boost unlocked door number 516, one of the few that didn’t have a camera, and motioned Notarbartolo inside. The office was quite plain, furnished with just a desk, a worktable, some cabinets, and a few chairs. Fluorescent light tubes flickered overhead, just like in the hallways, and the floor was covered with flat gray industrial carpeting. A bank of windows overlooked a gravel alleyway and some overgrown vacant lots behind the building. Tenants on the other side of the hallway enjoyed the better view of the Diamond District and Antwerp’s famous skyline, dominated by the gothic cathedral that lorded over the sixteenth-century market square. But Notarbartolo didn’t mind his subpar view. The office was just part of the ruse, a place to kill time between reconnaissance missions to the vault, the heart of the building where its tenants stored hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of diamonds, gold, cash, and jewels.
Finding the office more than satisfactory for his purpose, Notarbartolo was led back to the elevator, where Boost pushed the button for floor -2, two levels underground. When the doors slid open, Notarbartolo was struck by how bright the vault foyer was. Fluorescent bulbs lit the white walls and white tile floor, lending the space the appearance of an antiseptic operating room. A large white Siemens video camera was slung from the ceiling; the lighting in the foyer provided it with a television-studio-quality image of the small room.
They exited the elevator and turned left. At the end of the small room, a heavy vault door stood open into the foyer. Unlike in the movies, where vault doors are the color of handsome brushed chrome, this was painted a flat rust-colored maroon and it stood out under the stark lighting. A secondary steel-gated door barred entry to the safe room itself.
Boost rattled off the vault’s security features as they walked to the gate and peered through the bars into the safe room, but she wasn’t telling Notarbartolo anything he couldn’t see for himself with his specially attuned eyes. He saw that vault door was made by the Dutch company LIPS, and was among the sturdiest ever constructed. It was at least a foot thick and made of iron and steel.
