The police dug out a series of prepaid SIM cards that were linked to cell phones used almost exclusively to call three Italians: Elio D'Onorio, aka the Genius; Ferdinando Finotto, alias the Monster; and the person most likely to be Speedy, an anxious, paranoid man named Pietro Tavano, a longtime associate of Notarbartolo's.

"I may be a thief and a liar," he says in beguiling Italian-accented French. Notarbartolo used women's hair spray to temporarily disable the vault's combined heat/motion sensor. He has chosen a bad moment to come out of prison and see whether he can cash in on the loot. He jammed the shaft into one of the locks and cranked for about three minutes—until the lock broke, snapping open the box. Denice Oliver, the adjuster who investigated the robbery for insurers, calls this the "double whammy"—these dealers would have gotten the insurance payouts and kept their stock. But $100 million? The casualness was gone. In February of that year, $100 million worth of diamonds and jewelry disappeared from one of the most secure vaults in the world.

Over the past 14 weeks, we have met seven times in the prison visiting room, and yet questions remain.

"I can disable most of it," the Genius said with a smile. Peys stepped on a diamond-encrusted bracelet. He still remembers every detail of his first robbery. The following evening, the gang made their move.

With the cell phone records and the peculiarly precise salami sandwich evidence, the Belgian detectives persuaded French police to raid the home of Finotto's girlfriend on the French Riviera.

The story line of any sophisticated caper allows for plenty of subplots, double-crosses and high-intensity escape scenes. The industry is in a recession. The high-strung Pietro Tavano is serving a five-year sentence in Italy for the crime. The incredible story of how Leonardo Notarbartolo, ringleader of the infamous crime gang the School of Turin, pulled off one of the most audacious robberies ever. He took out another. The police never determined how the men had entered the building. He decided to burn the stuff near a shed beside a small pond and headed back to the car. However, it’s important to bear in mind that a confidence man such as Notarbartolo is always liable to embellish the truth slightly. Notarbartolo pulled off the highway and turned onto a dirt road that led into a dense thicket. It was now safe for the others to enter. The second is that in the days after news of the robbery broke, the British government issued a “D Notice” that prevented the press from reporting any further on the story. The story line of any sophisticated caper allows for plent. Notarbartolo took the exit and surveyed the darkened surroundings. He seemed to be standing in the vault antechamber. Notarbartolo says the Italian authorities traveled to Belgium soon after the heist to question him about Capizzi's possible role in the robbery. The rest of the team was already driving back to Italy with the gems. But Notabartolo says that the Monster knew exactly what he was doing.

Joking aside, this is a worrisome story.

During the day, they travel from office to office in briefcases, coat pockets, and off-the-shelf rollies.

The escorts bristled with firepower. Speedy ran up the stairwell. The $20 million found by the thieves belonged to traders not in on the scam.

On Monday—about 36 hours after the job was completed—the team of thieves reassembled at a bar in Adro, Italy, a small town about 50 miles northeast of Milan. The thud-thud-thud of a police helicopter beat over a convoy of police cars escorting an armored truck through the heart of Antwerp. Everybody had a lot of questions for the dealer.

He puts his hands on the table. He didn't believe it could be robbed until the dealer went to extraordinary lengths to prove him wrong. It would take hours to gather everything up and burn it. They are seemingly tailor-made for the silver screen. In 1971 a group of criminals dug a 50-foot tunnel to break into the vault of Lloyd’s Bank in London.

The Monster unzipped one and pulled out a leather satchel. After seven years, authorities were finally able to announce that they made one arrest in the case. Four days later, the detectives executed a search warrant on the apartment Notarbartolo rented in Antwerp.

Magnetic sensor6. "This is a ridiculous time to be having a panic attack," Notarbartolo muttered. It was a cramped, narrow place with a half-dozen small tables, but from the corner by the window Notarbartolo could look out on the epicenter of the world's diamond trade. In a scene that might have been taken out of a John Grisham mystery novel, Leonardo Notarbartolo, the mobster and mastermind behind the $100 million diamond heist-of-the-century from a vault beneath the Antwerp Diamond Center in 2003, has now made a “prison confession” alleging that he was the victim of a sting organized by a Jewish diamond dealer, who allegedly had a number of accomplices. For this generous fee, Notarbartolo, who rented his own safety deposit box to store his ill-gotten gains in the building’s impregnable vault, compiled a surveillance package detailing the kind of challenges facing anyone who would be brave (or foolish) enough to attempt a break-in, and he came to the conclusion that – no matter how skillful – no thief would be able to slip in and out of the vault undetected. Notarbartolo intends to set the record straight. The Genius led them out the rear of the building into a private garden that abutted the back of the Diamond Center. Therefore, it was only upon examining the valuables at their safe house, well after they had left the scene of the crime, that the thieves’ enthusiasm over the perfect job began to wane. Videos from the camera were used to make a full scale mock-up of the vault in an abandoned warehouse so the thieves could rehearse. The city was crawling with cops—maybe they would be looking for them. Locked steel grate5.

It was also empty. Notarbartolo reflected on his interactions with the diamond dealer, and a thought flashed through his mind: Maybe the dealer wasn't operating alone. To enter, four numbers had to be dialed, and the digits could be seen only through a small lens on the top of the wheel.

Unfortunately for Notarbartolo, a disgruntled property owner reported the pair for flytipping, and the police investigated, finding not only the empty bags from the jewellery, but also a half-eaten salami sandwich covered in Notarbartolo’s DNA and the receipt for a camera in Notarbartolo’s name. Walking around the vault, it soon became clear to the Italian that what he was standing in was, in fact, an exact replica of the Diamond Centre’s vault, with every detail precisely as he remembered from his reconnaissance mission. About $3 billion worth of gem sales were reported here in 2003, but that's not counting a hidden world of handshake deals and off-ledger transactions. The reality, Notarbartolo says, is that he thought the vault was impregnable. Eighty percent of the world's rough diamonds pass through this three-square-block area, which is under 24-hour police surveillance and monitored by 63 video cameras. He was a tenant in the building and rented a safe-deposit box in the vault to secure his own stash. He has always denied having anything to do with the crime and has refused to discuss his case with journalists, preferring to remain silent for the past six years. The others would split the rest. Nobody would ever find the stuff here. Power tools wouldn't do the trick. At a glance, it looked like a simple highlighter, but the cap contained a miniaturized digital camera capable of storing 100 high-resolution images.

When not reading or writing he is either on a bike or wishing he were on a sailboat. Notarbartolo and Speedy just had to burn the incriminating evidence sitting in a garbage bag in the backseat. Working in the dark, the criminals didn’t realize they were boosting empty safe deposit boxes. In Notarbartolo's videos, the guard usually visited a utility room just before opening the vault. Traders on the inside, he says, had removed their jewels prior to the robbery so they could file huge insurance claims. There was no reason to worry. The garbage bag filled with incriminating evidence sat in the backseat. The Italian anti-Mafia police contend he is tied to the Sicilian mob, that his cousin was tapped to be the next capo dei capi—the head of the entire organization. To revisit this article, select My⁠ ⁠Account, then View saved stories. Billions of dollars in diamonds pass by the café's window. So in Notarbartolo, who was in his mid-50s at the time and very much the confidence man of the group, there was no better man for the job. It made him fume with anger.

Jared is a full-time writer living in southeast Georgia. More gems were vacuumed out of the rolled-up carpet from Notarbartolo's Antwerp apartment. And it includes the new revelation that the massive diamond heist might actually have been a cover-up for a colossal insurance fraud. Notarbartolo stepped inside the vault. Or: There was no insurance scam. Finally, the lock required an almost-impossible-to-duplicate foot-long key. Each job brought a different mix of thieves into play. The same camera was used to secretly record guards entering the vault’s combination so the King of Keys could further disable other security measures. Admittedly, not all goods may have been insured. They were accused of breaking into the Antwerp Diamond Center’s supersecure vault and stealing $100 million in diamonds, gold and jewelry. On Thursday night, Notarbartolo ate dinner with his family at home outside of Turin. In half an hour, they were huddled around the bags in the apartment. He bought small stones, paid cash, dressed well, and cheerfully mangled the French language. A heat-sensing infrared detector monitored the terrace, but he approached it slowly from behind a large, homemade polyester shield.

Notarbartolo pressed a buzzer on the steel grate.

Notarbartolo felt like he had stepped into a movie.

He was right on schedule. Their cargo: De Beers' monthly shipment of diamonds, worth millions. They covered the security cameras with black plastic bags and flipped on the lights. At first, Notarbartolo was confused. The training in the mockup vault had been so intense that no lights were used during the heist itself – also to avoid the heat of light being detected. There were also a lot of holes with rabbits in them. The breakthroughs and innovations that we uncover lead to new ways of thinking, new connections, and new industries. The heist wouldn't be discovered until guards checked the vault on Monday morning. The dealers probably never knew that they had just welcomed one of the world's best jewel thieves into their circle.

With millions of dollars at stake there should be no doubt as to why. The safe-deposit boxes themselves were made of steel and copper and required a key and combination to open. The diamonds are hurried directly into safety-deposit boxes, which are locked with both a key and combination, and then placed in the high-security vault – an underground chamber fitted with motion, heat and light detectors and sealed with a three-tonne steel door that is rated to withstand 12 hours of continuous drilling. The day Notarbartolo was arrested, Italian police broke open the safe at his home in Turin. The local teenagers once decided to have a party there and burned down a little hut he'd built.



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