Flawless: Inside the Largest Diamond Heist in History (20 page)

Just as the thieves could guess when they were stealing from a wholesaler, it was also obvious when they opened a box owned by a jewelry firm, as these overflowed with gleaming rings, necklaces, and bracelets. One box produced a 100-gram gold Cartier bracelet that, in the value of the gold alone, was worth about $10,000; a gold necklace with a pendant spelling “Sony”; and a ring with the initials “J.H.” In another box, they found a custom diamond-studded cigarette lighter, a gold Star of David, and a package of Israeli bonds. Another box stored a stash of about a million U.S. dollars.

The School of Turin opened forty boxes, then fifty, then sixty. The thieves stopped only to switch off the duty of cranking the boxes open with the pulling tool, which required a lot of exertion. They drank bottled water they had brought with them, throwing the empties on the pile of discarded bags and boxes. Their work surely raised the temperature in the vault, but, so long as the Styrofoam stayed in place on the motion detector to mask their movement, they didn’t worry about setting off the alarm. Regular phone calls to their colleagues on the outside confirmed that the streets of Antwerp were as quiet and sleepy as ever. No one had any idea what they were up to in the subterranean vault.

The only sign of movement at the building occurred around two in the morning when Jacques Plompteux returned to the Diamond Center with his brother-in-law after their night out drinking. As they entered, they virtually traced the School of Turin’s footsteps through the garage and through the door leading to C Block. Jacques later told police that they went straight to his apartment and then to bed while the biggest heist in history was taking place several floors below. Half an hour later, Jorge—who was not on duty and who had been having dinner at his parents’ house, followed by drinks with a friend—also returned to the Diamond Center. He later reported to the police that he didn’t see or hear anything unusual when he returned to his apartment that night.

Down on the vault level, there was a sudden snag in the plan: the pulling tool broke with the unmistakable high-pitched ping of shearing metal. The steel prong used to pull the doors outward from the keyhole had broken in half without so much as budging the door they were attempting to pry open. It was only a momentary problem; the School of Turin wasn’t to be outdone by equipment failure, and, from one of their bags, they pulled out another metal prong. They’d had several made just in case the tool wore down and broke after enough use.

What they didn’t know was that stressed steel had nothing to do with the prong’s wearing down. The safe deposit box on which their tool broke was one of several that locksmith Paul De Vos had upgraded over the years—this newer door did not have a plastic faceplate covering the internal lock mechanism, but a reinforced steel faceplate. Had the Diamond Center acted on De Vos’s earlier suggestion that all the safe doors be replaced with sturdier ones, the pulling tool wouldn’t have worked at all.

For the thieves, it was a mystery. While most doors opened with relatively little resistance, a few didn’t budge at all. They discarded the prongs that snapped in half in the pile of empty boxes on the vault floor and moved on to try other safe deposit box doors. Although they were quickly amassing an enormous fortune in the bags at their feet, they had no intention of stopping until they opened every door they could before it was time to leave.

Some of the boxes had contents worth as much as any jewelry store they’d ever robbed in Turin. Some had more. From one, they grabbed a platinum ring with more than seven carats of stones, a four-carat marquise diamond, a pearl necklace, gold bracelets, gold necklaces, an envelope with
22,000, packages of uncut diamonds weighing about two hundred carats, and a creatively designed brooch depicting a bird in its nest made of gold and diamonds.

The vault looked like a bomb had gone off, with shrapnel made of gems and gold. Safe deposit box doors stood agape around the room. On the floor was a riot of empty bags and boxes, in addition to bracelets, rings, gold ingots, and loose diamonds. As their bags were crammed with ever more treasure, they needed to be selective about what they could take with them. To make room for the most valuable items, they had to sacrifice some that were worth less.

A metal prong broke off in the keyhole for box number 25. This may well have been the last of their backups. It was shortly before dawn and they had been working hard in a state of heightened anxiety for many hours. They had broken into one hundred and nine of the Diamond Center’s one hundred and eighty-nine deposit boxes. Notarbartolo’s own safe deposit box was among those that were not breached, part of a large section of still-locked doors that the School of Turin hadn’t gotten around to breaking open.

The thieves had been awake since whatever fitful sleep they’d been able to get Friday night. Adrenaline—and the euphoria of stealing as yet uncounted millions of dollars in diamonds—could only last so long. They were approaching the giddiness of full-blown fatigue, and there were many risks ahead. They needed to make their escape while it was still dark outside. They didn’t want to risk there being any traffic on the street or any early risers walking their dogs before church. Besides, it was best to exit while the concierges were likely to be sound asleep; neither of them was likely to get up early on a Sunday morning.

Leaving, however, was easier said than done. They had a heavy load of tools and treasure to sneak out of the building. Some tools were sacrificed to make space for more loot; they left the crowbar, for example, amid the debris from the boxes. That was a surprising deviation from the discipline they’d honed throughout every other aspect of the heist. On a normal job, they would carry out with them everything they had brought in. The School of Turin knew that investigators would carefully examine anything left behind for clues, and its standard mode of operation was to give the police as little as possible to go on. The men had been careful to ensure that the items they planned to leave behind—such as the Styrofoam and the tape on the light detector—had been thoroughly cleaned to eliminate fingerprints or other clues.

But after several hours of looting, they had a true embarrassment of riches on their hands: they’d stolen more than they could carry. They only wanted to make one trip out of the building in order to minimize their exposure and they wanted to do it while it was still early. And there was so much worth stealing that, in the end, they had to make tough decisions; should they take the crowbar or leave it behind so they could steal another brick of gold?

The bags were zipped closed and arranged at the door to the stairwell. They took a last look around at their handiwork, surely with a tinge of regret at the millions of dollars’ worth of gems and jewels scattered on the floor that they simply couldn’t take with them. Then they called their friends on the outside to tell them they were coming out.

At the Charlottalei apartment, Tavano put on his coat, grabbed the car keys, and took the elevator to the ground floor. The lookout on the street near the Diamond District reported that the coast was clear. The thieves had the go-ahead to vacate the vault. They didn’t even attempt to cover their tracks; they left the doors wide open and the lights on. There was no point wasting time trying to disguise the crime since it was going to be apparent to the first person who came down to the vault Monday morning.

The thieves retraced their steps as carefully and quietly as they could with the loads they carried. The bag of diamonds alone weighed at least forty-four pounds, as much as a microwave oven. On the way to the garage, one of the men ducked off toward the Schupstraat entrance and, using another fabricated key, opened the door to the security control room. He ejected the tapes that had recorded their crime from the two VCRs, placing them in his backpack, and replaced them with blanks. He looked through the archive of the previous month’s tapes and stole the four tapes that had recorded the happenings of February 10, the day D’Onorio snuck into the building and sabotaged the magnetic alarm. They were not hard to find as the tapes were labeled by date and organized accordingly. He exited the control room quickly, locked the door behind him, and rejoined the others.

The final task was a coordinated, smooth withdrawal from the Diamond Center. Again, the thieves were on the phone with both Tavano and the lookout. As the car pulled to the curb, the lookout gave the green light and they opened the garage door. After the sweaty work in the vault, the predawn winter air was bitingly cold as the men swiftly left the building. The car sagged on its springs as heavy bags of stolen diamonds, cash, gold, and jewels were dumped in the trunk, no more than fifty feet from where police officers pulling the graveyard shift sat bundled in heavy coats in the police kiosk around the corner on Schupstraat.

The thieves piled into the car and disappeared down the street.

The temptation to shout in exhilaration must have been overwhelming. But considering that it was dawn on a Sunday, they wisely refrained from waking Notarbartolo’s neighbors. Exhaustion was creeping in, but it couldn’t overcome the powerful, otherworldly high that made them lightheaded. The thrill of having gotten away with the heist of the century was better than falling in love. It was better than every holiday and birthday they’d ever had.

The men beamed at each other, the intense focus of the past several hours bleeding off into a faint awe that they had pulled it off. They wasted little time pouring the king’s ransom of treasure onto the large, reddish rug in the middle of the floor to tally their ill-gotten gains and divide the loot into parcels that would be taken separately back to Italy. No one seemed to mind this part of the job.

Like the winners in a game of Monopoly, they sorted and counted stacks of multicolored cash. Most of it was American currency, because diamond prices are set to the U.S. dollar throughout the world. There were also euros, Swiss francs, British pounds, Indian rupees, Australian dollars, outdated Belgian francs, and Israeli new sheqalim. They decided that they should throw away the more obscure currencies that would be hard to redeem without risking questions. The rupees were tossed into a large garbage bag that was already being filled with the equipment from the job, including the dismantled pulling tool that had served them so well, the alligator clips they used to test the wires in the ceiling, rolls of duct tape, and other material that could tie them to the heist.

They sorted the government bonds and stock certificates which came from around the world, most from Belgium but a few from as far away as Israel. The watches took up a lot of space because most were stolen with their original packages so as to make them easier to sell. The diamond earrings were piled so high they looked like a glittering snowdrift on the rug. The men passed jewelry back and forth to one another, admiring the settings in a ring or studying the emeralds, rubies, and sapphires in the bracelets and necklaces.

What surely entranced them the most, however, was the staggering cache of diamonds they’d stolen, so many that their weight strained the seams of the bag. They were poured carefully onto the rug. There were thousands of rough and polished diamonds—many of the latter were in their blister packs while others were wrapped in diamond papers. The men hadn’t taken the time in the vault to open these paper packages, so they peeled apart the folds on the living room floor to discover what they contained. Some had great stones, which were added to the pile of diamonds on the carpet.

Others contained comparatively worthless pebbles, such as a package that was filled with hundreds of emerald pointers, tiny green rocks in a marquise shape that were four or five hundredths of a carat. Static caused them to pop off the surface of the inner layer when the package was opened and a few jumped onto the rug; this was a common problem with tiny stones and merchants often took special care when opening such packages of pointers.

The members of the School of Turin weren’t as delicate. They didn’t even notice the little emerald stones that were quickly lost in the fibers of the rug. All they cared about was that the package’s contents were worthless compared to the other items they’d stolen. The paper was crumpled up—pointers and all—and tossed in one of the trash bags. “Even though this little collection of emeralds still had some value,” as Peys later explained, “at that moment, in comparison to what else they had, it was rubbish. It’s like having an envelope with tens of thousands of dollars and one with small coins.”