Flawless: Inside the Largest Diamond Heist in History (32 page)

Yet another theory was that Notarbartolo had agreed to take the risk of being nabbed as the leader in order to protect the others. Insurance investigator Denice Oliver was a proponent of that idea; she believed Notarbartolo knew enough about the habits of the Belgian police from his time of reconnaissance to consider the possibility of doing real time to be extremely low.

“The guy came back and he thought, ‘Fat chance of anything because they never get any results anyway,’” she said. “It’s renowned around the world that the Belgian police are useless, with all due respect to Patrick [Peys] and Agim [De Bruycker].”

Arrestees were rarely held for long periods in Belgium, which made such a calculated risk all the more reasonable. Typically, suspects were held for a maximum of six months unless evidence emerged of their involvement in new crimes or in an ongoing crime. This was why the court released Falleti on bail after six months of detention.

Even in cases in which the evidence of a suspect’s guilt was overwhelming, as it was in this case, it was unusual for the courts to order the suspect detained until the start of the criminal proceedings. Since the heist was a one-time event, it seemed logical that a lawyer could have arranged for Notarbartolo’s release. That had been the basis for Damen’s nearly successful plea for bail in November 2004. The plea had been granted but then denied on appeal.

In Oliver’s view, the judicial department took exception from the norm for Notarbartolo because the stolen goods hadn’t been recovered; suspicion of possessing stolen goods could constitute his ongoing participation in a crime. “That guy came back thinking, ‘What’s three [to six] months? I’ll be out and having a great life and [be] driving to Italy and seeing my wife and son and whatever,’” Oliver explained.

From the prosecutors’ perspective, Notarbartolo was the ringleader because he was clearly involved on the deepest level. The prosecution team was determined to make someone pay for what had happened; it would have lowered their chances of getting the maximum penalty to admit any uncertainty they may have had regarding who organized the heist. In fact, the Italian investigation into the matter was ongoing, with detectives in Italy still trying to find out who was involved, even as the trial against the known suspects was underway.

Damen and the other defense attorneys unsuccessfully argued for a further delay pending the outcome of the Italian investigation. Damen was especially interested in what would become of inquiries by the Anti-Mafia Brigade in Palermo, which had sent a unit of detectives to Belgium to question both Falleti and Notarbartolo about suspected ties to organized crime. Damen hoped the investigation could sow doubt about Notarbartolo’s role as the ringleader.

Palermo, the capital of Sicily, is a well-known hub for drugs entering Europe from South America and Afghanistan, and investigators knew that Notarbartolo’s family hailed from there. While Notarbartolo also had an uncle with Mob ties that the authorities asked him about, it was his cousin Benedetto Capizzi they were interested in. Anti-Mafia police had once photographed Notarbartolo while he attended the wedding of Capizzi’s son in Palermo. Additionally, Notarbartolo made calls while in prison to Capizzi’s wife.

Capizzi was the alleged head of the Villagrazia area of Palermo at the time and was later selected to be the boss of bosses for Cosa Nostra. In December 2008, police arrested Capizzi, along with almost a hundred other suspects, to prevent a bloodbath as another Mafia faction had its own ideas for who should be the new head of the entire Sicilian Mafia.

The anti-Mafia investigators theorized that the Mob had sponsored the heist to finance a drug operation but their investigation eventually went nowhere.

The judges decided not to wait for the Italians to finish their work, ruling that the results wouldn’t change the materiality of the evidence against the defendants. After the trial, the defendants’ Italian attorneys claimed that this was one of the ways in which their clients’ rights had been violated: by rushing to court before the Italian investigation was complete.

On March 17, 2005, Damen tried another tactic: arguing that his client would not be able to get a fair trial as a result of investigators’ cooperation with the media, namely
Primetime Live
. Millions of viewers in the United States had watched “The Great Diamond Heist.” The decision by police officials to cooperate with the program sent shockwaves through the Belgian legal community, as the Belgian judicial system grants greater protection for the privacy interests of defendants, before or after conviction, than does the United States. In Belgium, there’s little belief in the public’s right to know about a pending legal case. Therefore, the
Primetime Live
show startled many people in that Peys and De Bruycker discussed actual evidence against the perpetrators. After an eternity of “no comments” to the media, they had appeared on TV to explain in detail how a high-profile crime had occurred and why they thought the defendants had done it.

In court, Damen argued that the case against his client should be thrown out as the police had violated Belgian laws regarding the confidentiality of an open investigation and prejudiced the case against Notarbartolo. Though the Court of Appeal strongly disapproved of the police participation with ABC, it ruled that the program would not affect the case. Since the case would be decided by judges and not a jury, the court didn’t have to consider how the program might have influenced its members. The judges simply said they would base any decision solely on the case file and would ignore what was said on the program.

On March 24, 2005, it was Jan De Man’s turn to argue Falleti’s case. He told the judges that Falleti had an innocent explanation for everything that the prosecution believed tied him to the crime: his prepaid phone, his role in carrying the rug out of the apartment, and other such details. He may have done those things, De Man said, but he didn’t know what he was doing; he hadn’t known anything about the crime. De Man argued that the prosecutors needed to prove that Falleti “knowingly” participated in the criminal conspiracy. The court agreed and the charges against Falleti were altered to specify that in order to be found guilty, it would have to be proven that he knew he was helping cover up a crime.

On Thursday, May 19, 2005, after more than a month of hearings, the Court of Appeal rendered its decision. The court convicted four of the defendants, only one of whom was in the courtroom. Leonardo Notarbartolo was sentenced to ten years in jail and fined
1 million. If he did not pay the fine, then he faced an additional three months in jail. The other convictions were for the three defendants who were still safe in Italy.

It had seemed, briefly, that these three might get off on a technicality. In D’Onorio’s case, an Italian court had ruled that his DNA evidence had been obtained from his home illegally. D’Onorio’s lawyer, Patrick Kortleven, argued to the Belgian court that the DNA evidence against him was inadmissible for the same reason. The court agreed, but ultimately concluded that there was enough evidence against him without the DNA to support a conviction.

Likewise, Finotto’s Italian lawyer, Monica Muci, later complained that the DNA evidence against her client shouldn’t have been brought up in court at all because the laboratory testing had been done without a defense expert present. The method used to test the DNA had destroyed the sample, so Finotto’s defense team didn’t have a chance to perform an independent comparison. In the end, Muci claimed Finotto was railroaded. She was the same attorney who had convinced an Italian appeals court to overturn his conviction for the 1997 bank robbery attempt by arguing that Finotto was only casing the bank, not attempting to rob it.

Arguments about the DNA during the trial went nowhere, and Finotto, D’Onorio, and Tavano were each sentenced to five years in jail and fined
5,000.

In addition to the jail time, the court ordered all four convicted defendants to pay a total of more than
4.5 million to the diamond merchants they had robbed. In the Belgian system, civil plaintiffs could participate in a criminal proceeding to recover the value of items stolen from them. Seventy-five victims were reported altogether; not everyone who was robbed elected to be part of this case. Of these, thirty plaintiffs had only a single euro awarded to them to indicate that, while they were owed money, the amount of that money had yet to be determined.

Notarbartolo began serving his term immediately, while the court promptly issued arrest warrants for the other three.

When the three defendants in Italy heard that a court in Belgium had sentenced them to five years in jail each, they would have found the classic quote by Brendan Behan, the Irish writer and revolutionary, appropriate: “Court-martialled in my absence, sentenced to death in my absence. So I said, right, you can shoot me—in my absence.”

The court cleared Antonino Falleti and Adriana Crudo. The prosecutors had asked the court to sentence them to eight months and eighteen months in jail, respectively, as well as a fine. There was not enough proof that they had knowingly attempted to cover up the crime, even though they had been helping to clear out the apartment that had been used as local headquarters for the heist.

For Falleti, it was the end of a nightmare. He regretted the outcome for his friend, but the fact that he had been officially acquitted was too overwhelming to make him anything but ecstatic. Falleti, his wife, and his legal team went to a nearby café to celebrate with a few bottles of champagne. Jan De Man, the lawyer he’d found by yelling out of a cell window, clinked glasses and congratulated his client, but had a dire prediction for Notarbartolo. Typically, prisoners in Belgium only served a third of their sentence before they were considered for early release. De Man’s opinion was that Notarbartolo was so publicly reviled that he’d do every day of his ten years, which, when counting time served, would see him released in 2013. Notarbartolo would be sixty years old.

For Notarbartolo, the only bright side of his conviction was that he wouldn’t be returning to the Prison of Antwerp. After he was trotted past the media outside the courtroom so they could get good shots of the now-convicted master thief, Notarbartolo was sent to a long-term detention facility in Hasselt, an hour’s drive southeast of Antwerp. The new
38.4-million facility had been opened just weeks before his conviction.