Flawless: Inside the Largest Diamond Heist in History (30 page)

With every passing day, the chance of finding a single stolen carat diminished further. They were looking for the proverbial needle in a haystack.

Chapter Twelve

THE TRIAL

“Any time you take a chance, you better be sure the rewards are worth the risk because they can put you away just as fast for a ten dollar heist as they can for a million dollar job.”

—
The Killing
(1956)

From the moment his name was tied to the biggest heist of all time, Leonardo Notarbartolo’s carefully cultivated anonymity disappeared just like the loot he pilfered from the Diamond Center. The School of Turin soon became infamous around the world, as much for the genius of their crime as for the manner in which they were caught.

The long months leading up to the trial were marked by international media interest that only intensified as the thieves’ day in court approached.

Turin’s daily newspaper,
La Stampa,
couldn’t seem to decide if Notarbartolo should be treated as a folk hero or a villain. One reporter christened Notarbartolo with the nickname “the Man of Gold,” while another called the decision to leave the garbage in the Floordambos the mark of “amateurs” and “beginners.” A third wrote a long feature about the School of Turin’s background that made them sound like Robin Hood’s Merry Men.

The tone of the coverage in Antwerp was markedly different. The press identified Notarbartolo and the other arrestees as belonging to the Mafia, describing Notarbartolo not only as a man involved with organized crime, but also as a gunrunner and a drug dealer, allegations that were never substantiated.

The heist had been both devastating and embarrassing for the Diamond District, and the press coverage reflected this. Not only had safe deposit box holders in a major building been victimized, but the city’s most important industry had been threatened. A secure environment in which to trade was at the heart of the Diamond District’s ability to keep traders.

Despite grave concerns about security, no one seriously questioned Antwerp’s ability to secure diamonds. “Nobody left Antwerp because of what happened,” Philip Claes of the Antwerp World Diamond Centre later claimed. “It had no effect at all on the figures in general, of the imports or the exports, or the place of Antwerp as being number one as a world diamond center. What was very important, of course, is that the police rather quickly identified the guys who did it, so that was a relief, a relief to everybody. Okay, maybe the security failed, but the police did a great job.”

Perhaps it was a desire by law enforcement to highlight the success of their investigation that led them to the unprecedented decision to cooperate with
ABC News
on a story for
Primetime Live
. Immediately after the robbery was discovered, the story was reported around the world and widely covered in major American newspapers, but only superficially. As a policy, Belgian police never openly cooperated with journalists—and they had certainly never gone on a program with millions of viewers to discuss a case while the trial was still pending. The confidentiality of an investigation, in deference to the defendants’ rights to privacy and to ensure the credibility of the case against them, was taken more seriously in Belgium than in many other countries.

Initially, unit commander Agim De Bruycker simply refused to speak to the ABC team. But the television show’s tenacious producer, Simon Surowicz, did not take no for an answer. He was so persistent that he was “kicked out of many buildings,” Surowicz later recalled, including the police department and the justice building. Authorities even threatened to kick him out of the country if he didn’t stop trying to dig up details about the heist. Surowicz, however, was undeterred. He kept reaching up the chain of command, repeating his requests for access to information about the case until it finally paid off. Much to the detectives’ surprise, they were directly ordered by their supervisors to cooperate with Surowicz and the show’s on-air reporter, Jay Schadler. Though the reason for this about-face in policy was never explained, it was widely seen as a move to highlight the investigative skills employed by the Belgian government. Privately, the detectives knew they were lucky to have broken the case open so quickly; if it weren’t for Gust Van Camp, Notarbartolo and the others might never have been caught.

The American TV producer soon won over the detectives and gained their trust, particularly when they received a phone call from the security guards at the Diamond Center reporting that Surowicz had been caught in the building’s vault without permission. Surowicz had left ABC’s hidden camera equipment in the United States because he presumed the Diamond Center’s vault was as “impenetrable” as reported and he would have no use for it. But when he arrived in Belgium, he discovered that even after the heist of the century, the vault was far from impenetrable; it was accessible by anyone who pushed the correct button in the elevator.

Surowicz bought a small video camera and rigged a shoulder bag to conceal it, just as Notarbartolo had done. He entered the Diamond Center as the guest of one of the tenants and then, by himself, took the elevator to the bottom floor. Once there, he hung around in the foyer and filmed through the day gate at his leisure until finally—after several minutes had passed—a security guard arrived to question him. Surowicz was allowed to leave, but the incident was reported to the police.

The detectives were more amused than angry, Surowicz recalled, in part because he had single-handedly proven how slack the security continued to be less than a year after the biggest heist in history had occurred there. “I went to the place that was ‘impenetrable’ and at that time got the only footage that I know of,” he said.

The hour-long show aired almost exactly a year after the heist and compared the perpetrators to the fictional thieves in the film
Ocean’s Eleven
. It included Surowicz’s clandestine footage of the vault, computer reconstructions of many elements of the crime, and interviews with some of the victims. But the part of the show that had the most impact in Belgium was the interviews with Peys and De Bruckyer, in which the detectives openly discussed the evidence against their main suspect: Leonardo Notarbartolo. It was unprecedented in Belgium for police officers to speak so candidly about a case that was still under investigation. The only thing the show lacked was an outcome, as the wheels of justice were still barely spinning even as the diamond heist marked its first anniversary.

Just days after that one-year milestone, on February 19, 2004, after he’d been imprisoned for nearly six months, the court granted Falleti bail for a second time. At
25,000, it was ten times the amount of his prior bail. His first bail had been revoked when the police found additional evidence they believed strengthened their case against him. But since that evidence was not as strong as it had first appeared, the court allowed Falleti to leave jail again, albeit with a higher bail amount.

There was more good news for Falleti in mid-September 2004 when charges were dropped against his wife, Judith Zwiep. Her lawyer, Eric Boon, convinced the prosecutor that there was not enough evidence against her to continue the case. Now she could remain in Holland with no fear of ending up in jail. With Zwiep freed, Falleti could focus his energy on the charges he faced, knowing that even in a worst-case scenario, should he be found guilty, his children would have at least one parent to raise them while he served his time.

While Notarbartolo paced his cell in the Prison of Antwerp, the case against him moved slowly forward, plagued by delays. He was now the only one of the remaining defendants in jail. The trial—for all of the defendants at once—was to start on October 25, 2004, but hit another delay because the Belgians hadn’t properly summoned any defendants to court other than Notarbartolo. Falleti had received his court summons only the day before the court date, and some of the defendants who remained in Italy received no notice at all.

The court postponed the proceedings until late November. A week before the new trial date, the three-judge panel surprised many courtroom observers by agreeing to a motion by Walter Damen, Notarbartolo’s attorney, to set bail for his client in the amount of
50,000. In an accomplishment of biblical proportions, Damen successfully argued there was “absolutely no reason to hold Notarbartolo any longer. [There was] no more danger for collusion and, with imposing a guarantor, one eliminates the risk that he will flee from these proceedings.”

The collusion part made sense; the police had long ago finished their initial investigation. But Notarbartolo potentially faced eight more years in prison, and bail set at
50,000 was not nearly enough incentive to prevent him from fleeing. Notarbartolo kept that amount of money at home in cash and had just played a key role in successfully stealing well over a hundred million euros’ worth of loot. He was the very definition of a flight risk—he had no ties to the community and if he fled to his native Italy, he might have been beyond the reach of the Belgian authorities.

The prosecutor immediately appealed this decision and the court agreed not to grant Notarbartolo bail until the appeal was resolved. The appeal went against Notarbartolo and his bail request was ultimately denied.

Notarbartolo wasn’t the only member of the School of Turin the prosecutors needed to consider. In advance of the trial date, prosecutors were sure to get the proper paperwork into the hands of all the defendants—for instance, Falleti was served his summons in person after he got off a bus on his way home from work—but the summonses were written in Flemish.

The defendants’ lawyers argued that the summons should have been written in a language the defendants could understand. While the judges were not pleased with what would be yet another delay, they agreed that the summonses needed to be translated into Italian so the defendants could fully understand what these critical legal documents said. They did not want to risk a claim on appeal that the defendants were not properly served with notice of the charges against them. The prosecutors were ordered to serve the defendants again, this time with documents properly translated into Italian.

The prosecution, led by Ben Theunis, initially agreed to this seemingly reasonable request, but then, in yet another surprising maneuver, decided to appeal, arguing that there was nothing in Belgian law that required them to send out summonses in Italian. Of course, when the prosecutor’s office needed help from the Italian police, they had no problem translating long documents into Italian on those occasions.

The trial was put on hold for two months pending the outcome of the prosecutor’s appeal. This caused a significantly longer delay than if the prosecutor had simply translated the summonses. The calendar slowly wound its way toward the second anniversary of the heist.