Editor’s Note
This excerpt introduces the once-impenetrable security of Antwerp’s Diamond District, a hub for the global diamond trade. The scene is set for the dramatic heist that would follow.
Until February 2003, the three blocks of the Diamond District in Antwerp, Belgium, were considered one of the safest places in the world, with 63 security cameras distributed across its few streets and a specialized police division. Such precautions made sense, as 80 percent of the world’s rough diamonds passed—and still pass—through there. There, diamonds are cut, polished, and, of course, bought and sold in operations reaching $220 million per day.
At the very heart of the district lies the Antwerp World Diamond Centre, whose vault, on the building’s second basement level, then held 189 safe deposit boxes and was protected by ten state-of-the-art security systems. In these boxes, traders of the world’s most valuable stones stored their pieces while awaiting transactions, convinced they were leaving them in an impregnable place.
That seemed to be the case until the long Valentine’s Day weekend, between February 14 and 16, 2003, when four skilled thieves bearing the suggestive nicknames Genius, Monster, Speedy, and the King of Keys, led by Italian jeweler Leonardo Notarbartolo, breached each and every one of the vault’s security systems and emptied one hundred of those 189 boxes, making off with all kinds of diamonds worth $100 million.
The operation, planned over two years, was perfect, and the thieves would never have been caught if not for a crude mistake two of them made just as they were about to cross the border into France. Catching them didn’t help much, because the loot was never recovered and is still being sought today. It also remains a mystery whether they acted on their own or were hired by someone, and whether the robbery was an end in itself or a highly skillful maneuver to cover up a multi-million dollar fraud against the companies that insured the diamonds stored there.
When he was captured—without a single diamond in his possession—Notarbartolo claimed that many of the boxes they had breached were empty and that they had only taken stones worth about $18 million. According to him, those boxes had been emptied by their own owners shortly before the robbery to later collect insurance for the stones that were no longer there.
The plan began in 2001 when Notarbartolo, a jeweler by trade, rented an office in the World Diamond Centre building, where he conducted some verifiable buying and selling operations. What was never clear is whether he did them on his own because he was interested in establishing himself in the precious stones business—as he maintained to interrogators—or whether he actually did them with money and stones provided by the robbery’s financier.
The Italian jeweler—who already had a suspicious, though never proven, past in the black market for stones—claimed his business was entirely legal and that the robbery idea came later when someone approached him while he was having coffee at a bar on Hoveniersstraat, one of the busiest streets in the district, and made him an offer he couldn’t refuse.
For those 100,000 euros, Notarbartolo agreed to investigate the vault and discover if its security had weak points that would make a robbery possible.
The truth is that, whether for that commission or on his own, the Italian got to work. The first step was to rent a safe deposit box in the vault, which posed no difficulty because he was already known and, moreover, had an office in the same building.
To record as much as possible, he obtained a pen with a hidden miniature camera, with which he photographed the interior of the vault every time he accessed his safe deposit box, supposedly to store or withdraw stones. He also identified each of the alarm systems, sensors, and surveillance cameras.
He discovered there were ten security systems.
Up to the vault’s outer door, there was only one camera, but in the monitoring room, operators didn’t pay much attention when the person entering was someone they knew. The door had a simple lock and a four-digit digital combination. Additionally, it had been fitted with a magnetic sensor that activated if opened without a guard’s authorization.
Beyond the outer door was another, barred door, through which the interior of the vault was visible, where there were four other surveillance systems: light, motion, and heat sensors, and an internal camera. Finally, the walls had a seismic sensor to prevent any drilling.
In other words, it was burglar-proof.
