Editor’s Note
This article details a meticulously planned heist by the so-called “Turin School,” which nearly circumvented Antwerp’s formidable diamond district security. The story explores how they bypassed advanced defenses and where their almost-perfect plan ultimately faltered.
The Perfect Heist
Police, guards, gates, codes and cameras, motion, light and heat detectors – the accomplices from the “Turin School” outsmarted all the traps to pull off the perfect heist. Well, almost…
The Target: Antwerp’s Diamond District
The Diamond Quarter in Antwerp is obviously extremely secure. Twenty years ago, on the night of February 15-16, 2003, Leonardo Notarbartolo and his accomplices achieved the “impossible” by stealing €100 million from the Antwerp World Diamond Centre. Without any violence and by outsmarting all the security traps. À la Ocean’s Eleven. Prime Video released a series very loosely inspired by “the heist of the century” this Friday: Everybody Loves Diamonds. An opportunity to recall the feat of the henchmen from the Turin School with American lawyer and author Scott Andrew Selby. He co-wrote Flawless: Inside the Largest Diamond Heist in History with Greg Campbell, author of Blood Diamond.
Why This Heist?
“This story interested us because Antwerp is the world capital of diamonds. About 80% of the world’s diamonds pass through this city. The diamond district consists of only a few streets, but it is one of the most secure areas in the world. There are bollards and barriers to prevent vehicles from passing, a police station is installed there, and the area is packed with cameras. To enter the World Diamond Centre, a large building that offers offices for rent to diamond dealers, where the robbery took place, there was a guard, everyone must possess an electronic badge. Comings and goings are extremely monitored.”
What Were the Weaknesses?
Burglars see things differently. They scrutinized the security of the place until they found an opening. The Turin School discovered, for example, that the garage of the Diamond Centre faced a street that was not in the police’s line of sight. There were cameras in the building but no one to watch the footage over the weekend. They thought of stealing the recordings before leaving… And then, Leonardo Notarbartolo managed to pass himself off as a diamond dealer, rent an office in the building, and thus had all the time to observe the premises carefully. As a tenant, he could easily access the vault as much as he wanted every day of the week. They waited two years before taking action.
The Mastermind: Leonardo Notarbartolo
“Leonardo is a professional thief, undoubtedly one of the best. His family is from Sicily, but he grew up in Turin. He started with car thefts, before starting a completely legal business: a jewelry store… He designed his own jewelry, among other things. But, under the table, Leonardo Notarbartolo belonged to the Turin School. Its members all have a side job to justify their income. The particularity of this group is to choose and bring together people who have known each other for a long time and who are trained in very specific trades, skills they use to set up heists. Elio D’Onorio had an alarm business, another was a locksmith expert… Their approach was very modern, a bit like a startup. The organization’s hierarchy is horizontal.”
Security Oversight?
The Italian police were monitoring Leonardo Notarbartolo, notably for weapon possession. Would a simple call have sufficed to know who he was?
“He could never have become a member of an exchange in Antwerp, for example. Because it is incredibly difficult to get in. But renting an office was relatively easy. If they had called the police in Italy and asked for information about his case, the police would certainly have told the World Diamond Centre to be wary. Leonardo Notarbartolo was on the authorities’ radar. I think the level of security was so high within the building that everyone believed it was impossible to burglarize the place.”
The Most Impressive Feat
To enter the vault of the World Diamond Centre, the criminals managed to outsmart several detectors: motion, heat, light… Among all their feats, which one impressed you the most?
“The fact that they pulled off the heist with basic and cheap equipment. They still invented and built their own tool to force open the various safes in the vault, even though they didn’t have the combination codes and weren’t in possession of the key. I don’t know how they got those combinations… Notarbartolo claimed he installed a hidden camera, but I spoke to the person who built the vault, and he was convinced it was impossible to observe the numbers. Similarly, they did this without violence. No one was injured or traumatized. In fact, no one realized anything until Monday morning…”
