Flawless: Inside the Largest Diamond Heist in History (8 page)

Kamiel was arguably the busiest of the four guards. He sat in the security booth at the main entrance on Schupstraat watching the video monitors and the foot traffic swarming in and out of the Diamond Center during business hours. He checked visitors’ IDs and issued temporary passes, phoning the receptionists in the diamond businesses upstairs to confirm that strangers had legitimate appointments. It was his job to buzz open the fenced day gate to the safe room when tenants wanted access to their safe deposit boxes. At the end of the day, he rewound the videotapes that recorded all the images from the video monitors, labeled them with the date, and put fresh tapes in the VCRs.

Neither Andre nor Kamiel patrolled the halls. According to an account of their later statements to police, they relied purely on technology for the building’s security. Ironically, although he controlled access to the vault for more than one hundred tenants who stored invaluable wealth in their safe deposit boxes, Kamiel had never even gone to the bottom level of the Diamond Center. All he knew of the vault was what the video monitors showed him.

The picture that took shape in Notarbartolo’s mind was one of a staff that had grown dangerously complacent. The Diamond Center had never been robbed, and, based on what he could discern about the staff’s habits, no one expected it to be. They trusted the security of the Diamond District in which the building was located to deter most clear-thinking thieves, and they were certain that the impressive vault with its bombproof door would keep out anyone foolhardy enough to try anything.

Sitting alone in his office, Notarbartolo assembled something of a multimedia treasure map. The videotapes, the blueprints, and the reams of sketches he drew in the long hours spent sequestered in his office pretending to trade diamonds were equal parts informative and tantalizing. Through them, the School of Turin could easily imagine following this treasure map to riches.

Notarbartolo’s reconnaissance proved to the School of Turin that it had picked the right building to knock over. The staff’s lax approach to security stood in stark contrast to the other main diamond office buildings in the district, the four bourses. It was highly unlikely that Notarbartolo would even have gotten into the trading hall of a bourse to see for himself just how soft a target the Diamond Center was in comparison.

On any given weekday, the tables in the main trading hall at the Beurs voor Diamanthandel, which was founded in 1904, could be found scattered with coffee cups, crumpled napkins, mobile phones, day planners, and gemstone loupes. What a visitor noticed, however, wasn’t the cafeteria-style trappings, but the diamonds blinking like white Christmas lights in the sunlight cascading from the room’s twenty-five-foot windows. The loose diamonds were laid out on small white velvet pads or in little tissue-paper packages known as diamond papers unfolded into the shape of a paper box. They were handed around casually like someone passing the salt; when they were poured into metal measuring cups at the electronic scale on each table, they sounded like marbles being poured into a skillet.

The diamonds traded here and at the three other members-only bourses in the Diamond District were often sold in packages of hundreds of carats at a time in values that would blow the mind of anyone not accustomed to making transactions involving true wealth.

Diamonds are the most valuable commodities by weight known to man. A pocketful of ten single-carat brilliant-cut diamonds with exceptionally good color, cut, and clarity—altogether weighing only two grams, about the same heft as a pencil—is worth as much as $200,000 at retail. A kilogram of the same type of diamonds, weighing the equivalent of a liter of water and taking up as much space as a jar of peanuts, would retail for $200 million. Because of their small size, their enormous value, and their liquidity, diamonds are among the most coveted forms of wealth in the world.

They may be a girl’s best friend, but because of their return on investment—of time and planning—they’re also a thief’s. Because the diamond merchants in Antwerp were aware that, at any given moment, a plot was in the works to rob someone, there was a cautionary saying all along the diamond pipeline, from mine owners to diamond traders to the mom-and-pop jewelry store: “If they can touch it, they can steal it.”

Considering that, it was remarkable that the men gathered at the tables in the bourse could be so relaxed when dealing them from hand to admiring hand. It was common practice to temporarily part with your goods—whether to have them analyzed for cutting or to entrust them to a broker to sell for a specific price—and, therefore, merchants were often in possession of stones they didn’t own, perhaps from several different sources. These stones could easily be worth hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars. There weren’t even formal records of who had exactly what in their safe deposit boxes from one day to the next. Of course, this would only happen between people who trusted each other. Trust was the cornerstone of the diamond industry, and it acted as an antitheft device more powerful than the most advanced surveillance system or biometric lock.

This was one of the enduring paradoxes of the industry. Those who worked with diamonds were thoroughly paranoid about theft and yet, in order to do any business, they had to take one another at their word. It was an ancient and powerful tradition in the diamond industry that deals hinged on the weight of one’s reputation. Generally, this practice worked well, in large part because the industry was tightly cloistered. The ownership of many diamond companies spanned generations, and memory in the Diamond District went back just as far. Anyone tempted to run a scam on a fellow diamantaire risked not only his own reputation, but also his extended family’s.

This wasn’t to say that scams didn’t happen. Quite the contrary, they happened regularly enough that Antwerp had a dedicated unit of federal police detectives solely devoted to investigating crimes involving diamonds. They looked into everything from allegations of smuggling and money laundering to bait-and-switch schemes and other rip-offs. By and large, the latter con occurred when diamond merchants weren’t as vigilant as usual about with whom they did business.

Sleight-of-hand cons were common, in which someone examined a stone of a particular size and shape and deftly swapped it with a diamond of lesser value or a cubic zirconia, making off with the original before anyone noticed. In one particularly crafty switch, a man posed as a buyer for several meetings with a merchant selling a small parcel of stones. They came to an agreement on price and, as was typical, the merchant sealed the diamonds in a small envelope, scrawled the buyer’s name and the details of the stones on the outside, and placed it in his safe. When the buyer returned within twenty-four hours with the money, as had been agreed, he asked to take one more look at the goods. He was handed the envelope, but before he opened it, he patted his pockets as if he’d forgotten something. Looking embarrassed and apologetic, he handed the envelope back and said that he’d left his loupe in the car and that he would return momentarily. No one ever saw him or the diamonds again; in the brief moment he’d held the envelope, he’d switched it with one that was identical, except in one respect: it was filled with gravel, while the one he took had the diamonds.

Diamonds purloined like that were traded quickly, often before the end of the day just across the street from where they’d been stolen. By the time a ruse was reported to the police, the likelihood of ever getting them back was between slim and none. The new buyer most likely had no idea the diamonds were stolen from their previous owner; even if he did, it would not necessarily prevent a sale. It just meant an unscrupulous merchant was then in a position to negotiate a handsome discount for not asking too many probing questions. As always, there were people in the diamond business willing to make an easy profit by turning a blind eye.

Because of both tradition and the high volume of quick trades, diamond transactions involved no lawyers and no contracts and almost never any lawsuits if a deal went south. Two men simply agreed on a price for a certain parcel of stones, signed the envelope containing the stones, and shook hands. The Yiddish phrase
mazel und broche
—luck and blessing—sealed the deal no matter what one’s ethnicity. Even an Indian and a Chinese trader doing a deal in Dubai would use this expression.

After that point, backing out or changing the terms was as good as packing one’s office and getting into the cubic zirconia business, because one’s reputation as a diamond dealer would be sorely blighted. In the event of legitimate disagreements or misunderstandings, the bourse served as arbiter. This system was established by Antwerp’s first bourse, the Diamantclub van Antwerpen, which was founded in 1893, and it worked so well that as few as two disputes in its first thirty years had to be settled in civil court.

As long as you knew the person you were dealing with, there wasn’t much concern about lending someone a parcel with eighty carats of polished diamonds while he looked for a buyer for it. Few legitimate diamond dealers would give in to the temptation to swindle someone out of a mere $300,000 worth of diamonds when there was so much more to be had over the course of a lifetime.

Of course, that wasn’t true with everyone, which was why such robust security measures were deployed throughout the district. Trust would be exponentially harder to extend if it weren’t conducted within a web of security that included electronic surveillance, a platoon of police officers, and a fleet of armored cars.

Before technology allowed such a comforting dome to be placed over the Diamond District, confidence, trust, and a certain degree of courage were all a diamantaire had to rely on, and it resulted in practices that would be seen as ridiculous—even suicidal—today. At the turn of the twentieth century, long before the Diamond District contracted within its current borders, Jewish diamantaires and visiting traders from outside Antwerp simply set up shop at the cafés, diamond clubs, and restaurants on Pelikaanstraat just across from the train station. They would drink tea and wait for customers to arrive from Brussels or Amsterdam. Diamonds were bought and sold across the lunch table without a police officer in sight.

“I remember times when there was absolutely no security,” said Fay Vidal, an employee of IDH Diamonds, which had its offices in the Diamond Center. Vidal’s father and grandfather had also been in the diamond business, dealing stones on Antwerp’s streets long before there were surveillance cameras and specialized police forces. She was respectfully referred to as “Madame Vidal” by anyone who knew her, and she was something of an institution in the Diamond District, an old hand who knew the industry inside and out. She carried herself with an imperial flair and, although proudly Belgian by birth, could be mistaken by her accent and her demeanor for having royal French blood in her veins. “You’d put [the goods] in your drawer, or you had a little safe in the office, but we went on the street with millions of dollars’ worth of diamonds.”

After a sale, customers would jump back on a train with their pockets filled with diamonds, and the diamantaires would bicycle home at the end of the day with their goods in a briefcase jiggling in the front basket. The thought of such an open and trusting system would make today’s thieves go cross-eyed at the possibilities. Indeed, the threat of pickpockets, muggers, and scams by unsavory traders eventually imparted some common sense to the trade. The bourses formed in the late 1800s and early 1900s as clubs where diamantaires could wheel and deal with people who had been vetted by a membership committee.

The men in the Beurs voor Diamanthandel—as well as the three other bourses in the district: the Antwerpsche Diamantkring, the Diamantclub van Antwerpen, and the Vrije Diamanthandel—could be as casual as their Pelikaanstraat forebears because membership in the bourse was as reassuring as a Brinks truck. Someone walking in the front doors of any of the bourses would not get through the turnstiles in the lobby unless he was either a member or the guest of a member. Once inside the building, an invited guest could visit a private office but could not enter the trading hall itself unless he was a member of another bourse. The World Federation of Diamond Bourses represented twenty-eight of these members-only establishments worldwide.

Bourse memberships were not granted easily; one couldn’t even apply without two current members willing to vouch for them as sponsors. When a new application was received by a bourse, it was posted along with the applicant’s photograph on a cork bulletin board on the main trading floor of every bourse in the world. The members browsed these boards not out of curiosity but for security. They looked to see if they recognized anyone who might have screwed them in the past. If they did, they detailed their unsavory experience in a memo to the bourse membership committee. The allegation was investigated, and if substantiated, the application was denied. A record of the denial was entered into a database accessible to all bourses, along with the reason.

If an applicant survived two months on the bulletin board without any complaints, he was granted a provisional membership, which was susceptible to revocation. Even after he passed the trial period, he had to continue to operate aboveboard; if he was ever caught so much as failing to pay his taxes he could get kicked out of the bourse. And if a diamantaire was canned at one bourse, he would never get into another. It was a system that encouraged honest dealings; the trust displayed on the trading floors was well earned.