Editor’s Note
This article recounts the audacious 2003 Antwerp diamond heist, a meticulously planned “white-glove” robbery that netted an estimated $100 million in gems from the world’s most secure diamond district.
It was called “The Heist of the Century”. It was the biggest diamond robbery in history, an event that captured the world’s attention. Chroniclers of the time described the operation as “white-glove”, because no force or violence was used. The loot was valued at 100 million dollars. It happened in Antwerp, Belgium, in the “Diamond District”, the world’s largest gem district. This is a 2.5 square kilometer area where 85 percent of the world’s industry is handled. Right at its epicenter is the Antwerp World Diamond Centre (AWDC), a 13-story building with 225 commercial offices dedicated to diamonds, known for its impenetrable security. Until February 2003…
On Monday, February 17, 2003, in the middle of winter in Antwerp, the security guards entered the AWDC’s vault as they did every day.
Stunned, they called the security center to find out when it had happened, why the door had been opened, when the systems had been deactivated. “The alarm is set, no one entered,” they were told. The detectives looked at each other, unable to believe what they were hearing; they were inside and the vault, with its safe deposit boxes, had been looted.
The alert triggered a rapid response from the Antwerp Diamond Squad, the only one in the world specialized in these gems. They immediately began investigating. What thief would be capable of violating all the security measures? Getting to the boxes required different skills. First, the simplest: they had to bypass the surveillance at the building entrance. Then, once on the second basement level, where the vault is located, they had to get past a new guard post. Only then did the real challenge begin. They had to guess the combination on the vault lock, which changed every week and had more than 100 million possible combinations. Once inside the huge safe, they had to pass through heat and infrared ray detectors that would trigger the alarm at any movement. Finally, if they had managed such a feat, the thief had to open the 160 safe deposit boxes, each with its own key and individual security combination.
The first thing they did was look for the security videos, but the recordings from the weekend of the robbery had disappeared. The thieves had taken them. In those first hours, the news reached the media and the police were going around in circles… until a first clue arrived.
The key was some garbage bags. It was a farmer who, on the outskirts of the city, found waste and scraps of paper scattered in the middle of the forest, on his property, in the town of Floordambos. He managed to read “Antwerp”, “diamonds”… then he remembered the news about the robbery and called the police.
The police checked the highway between Antwerp and Floordambos until they found remains of videocassettes that they presumed could be from the security cameras of the World Diamond Centre. They also began to check the garbage bags and, among their remains, were able to reconstruct a document written in Italian: it was a request to install a security system in the World Diamond Centre building. All eyes turned to an inactive office, of Italian origin, and its tenant who, moreover, had a safe deposit box at the AWDC that, coincidentally, had not been broken into. They checked his background and other AWDC videos to identify him: “He looked like an ordinary middle-aged man dressed to camouflage himself and not be noticed,” they noted. His name was Leonardo Notarbartolo.
Today, a Netflix documentary, “The Antwerp Diamonds: The Heist of the Century”, presents its protagonists for the first time and provides some answers. It puts faces to the detectives who solved the case, Agim de Bruycker and Patrick Peys, and to those who know the secrets behind the heist.
