In September, 2003, an alliance of jewel thieves known as “the School of Turin” succeeded in breaking into what was thought to be an impregnable subterranean vault in a building located in the Diamond District in Antwerp, Belgium, an area of three short streets guarded like a demilitarized zone.
They stole at least 100,000 carats of rough and polished diamonds (one diamond alone was worth $1-million); 33 pounds of pure gold; cash in various currencies totalling at least $1.5-million; more than two dozen premium watches from designers such as Rolex, Omega and Bulgari, valued in the hundreds of thousands; and millions worth of securities, rare coins and jewellery. The total take has been estimated at half a billion dollars, with only a fraction of it recovered.
Flawless: Inside the Largest Diamond Heist in History details a real-life caper that brings to mind legendary heist films like Stanley Kubrick's The Killing and Steven Soderbergh's Ocean's Eleven. The authors – lawyer and diamond expert Scott Andrew Selby and journalist Greg Campbell, whose previous book, Blood Diamonds, documented the link among Third World war zones, international terrorists and diamonds – is a detailed reconstruction of a crime that follows a standard pattern: an inventive, seemingly foolproof plan, an elegant execution and a few careless mistakes that make the scheme unravel.
Flawless: Inside the Largest Diamond Heist in History, by Scott Andrew Selby and Greg Campbell, Union Square Press, 336 pages, $27.95
The book focuses on Leonardo Notarbartolo, a skilled con-man (blessed with the ability to be both charming and forgettable) and part-time jewellery designer. He rented an office in Antwerp's Diamond Center and spent two years systematically gathering intelligence that a group of specialists in the Italian city of Turin – experts in lock-picking, electronics and alarm systems, and laundering stolen goods – would analyze on their way to collectively devising the plan. A strength – and occasional weakness – of the book is the way the authors show the painstakingly time-consuming, step-by-step way a real crime unfolds.
Yes, the plan was complex, but many of the details were simple testaments to human ingenuity. How to disable a motion detector? (A film of hair spray.) A light sensor? (Black electrical tape.) A heat detector? (Styrofoam.) Reinforced safety deposit boxes? (A homemade corkscrew-like device.) When to commit the crime? (On a day when distractions included a local diamond industry figure's wedding – many who might otherwise be working late in the building would be at the event – and a tennis tournament featuring U.S. star Venus Williams.)
The sheer massed detail gathered from multiple sources is impressive
But just as the genius of the plan can be credited to simplicity, so can its undoing be traced to the simplest of dumb mistakes. Garbage was dumped in a wooded area near the Antwerp airport that turned out to be a wildlife and nature preserve obsessively patrolled by an elderly amateur conservationist. The contents of the garbage helped police identify a number of the gang members, including Notarbartolo.
And Notarbartolo, apparently blinded by hubris, returned to the scene of the crime even though the media was filled with reports of the daring robbery and the police had launched a massive investigation.
In the end, Notarbartolo and three accomplices were arrested, tried and jailed. But other members of the gang were never found and the majority of the loot remains unrecovered. Selby and Campbell suggest that the currency could have been laundered through legitimate businesses; the precious metals melted down, making them unidentifiable; and the jewellery disassembled and the gemstones fenced separately.
