Flawless: Inside the Largest Diamond Heist in History (16 page)

They had to move, and they had to move soon. Their plan was as ready as it would ever be from their remote location. The last item of business in Turin was to pick a date to attempt the heist. They decided on Saturday, February 15, 2003.

There were a few reasons that particular date was perfect. First, Antwerp was hosting two big events that weekend: the annual Proximus Diamond Games, a tennis tournament featuring American sensation Venus Williams for which the potential prize was a diamond-encrusted golden tennis racquet, and the February 14 wedding of Peter Meeus, the director general of the Diamond High Council, whose wedding reception was sure to segue into a night of partying. Either event would keep the few diamantaires who might otherwise be working over the weekend occupied. The School of Turin hoped the combination of the two would be enough to keep the district virtually deserted. Second, the men knew that Jacques was the concierge on duty that weekend. Since his apartment was on the fourth floor of C Block, they would run less risk of being overheard or encountered in a hallway than if it were Jorge, who lived one floor above the main level in B Block. Lastly, there was a De Beers Sight in London earlier that week, which meant that Antwerp would be bursting with diamonds.

That the date of their heist was scheduled for the day after Valentine’s Day was a nice bit of coincidental timing. Notarbartolo would not get to spend this holiday with his wife, as she would stay in Italy when he went to Antwerp. But if all went according to plan, it would be worth it. He would be able to give her more diamonds than a lifetime’s worth of Valentine’s Days.

Chapter Seven

MY STOLEN VALENTINE

No pressure, no diamonds.

—Proverb

Elio D’Onorio strode toward the Diamond Center on Monday, February 10, 2003. In his pocket was a work order, a single sheet of paper indicating that his security company had been hired by Leonardo Notarbartolo’s diamond firm to install a Sony video surveillance system in his office on the fifth floor of 9–11 Schupstraat.

In his workbag, D’Onorio carried a variety of wrenches, a hacksaw, a roll of strong double-sided tape, and a curiously shaped piece of metal. This metal plate was about eight inches square. One side was flat while the other had a two-inch lip on one of its edges and another two-inch-tall ridge welded across its middle, forming a T shape with the lip. It looked vaguely like a large trowel that would be used to smooth out wet cement.

Visitors to the Diamond Center were required to stop at the guard booth inside the front doors to announce their arrival. The company expecting them was required to confirm the appointment. Only then would the visitor exchange a photo ID for a temporary badge, enabling him to swipe through the turnstiles and access the rest of the building. Just as with tenants, a computer recorded the time visitors went in and out of the building.

Upon his arrival that morning, D’Onorio skipped this step. Instead, he breezed by the guard booth without pausing. Police believe there was no elaborate subterfuge. Instead, they think it’s most likely that Notarbartolo had simply lent D’Onorio his badge. Acting as if he’d been a longtime tenant, D’Onorio badged confidently through the turnstile and headed to the fifth floor. Had anyone stopped him because he was unfamiliar, he would have said he had borrowed Notarbartolo’s badge in order to get to work on the security system. He had the invoice in his pocket to back up his story. But no one stopped him.

The computer records from that day indicate Notarbartolo’s badge was used to enter and exit the building, with enough time between the two to indicate nothing but a normal day’s business for the Italian jeweler. D’Onorio, however, never left, although he somehow used the badge to make it seem like he did. This was easy enough to fake; maybe he had acted like he was on his way out of the building, swiped the card, and then pretended to take an urgent call on his cell phone that stopped him in his tracks. He could then have slowly edged his way back toward the elevators without anyone noticing he’d badged out for the sake of creating a computer record, but hadn’t actually left the building. Whatever the ploy, it would have been caught on videotape. But as long as the guard on duty didn’t notice it at the moment, D’Onorio didn’t care. He planned to steal the videotape later.

D’Onorio spent that day sitting in Notarbartolo’s office waiting until the sky turned dark, and with it, the room around him. He waited for hours, until he was sure that any late-working tenants had gone home for the night and that Jacques, the concierge on duty that week, was safely in his apartment in C Block. As he waited, D’Onorio thought about the details of his mission, pushing out of his head the knowledge that if something went wrong, he would be immediately sent to prison and the heist plot would be scuttled.

When he was sure the building was settled in for the evening, he slipped on a pair of thin rubber gloves and shouldered his workbag. He crept quietly out of the office, locking the door behind him. It was only a few paces to the elevator foyer and he was soon in the stairwell, gliding quickly down seven flights of stairs, listening for the sound of anyone else moving through the dark building.

When he opened the stairwell door into the vault foyer, D’Onorio found himself opposite the elevator doors, just as Notarbartolo had described. The large white Siemens video camera, dutifully recording the dark foyer, hung from the ceiling in front of the stairwell door. The room was not quite pitch dark; the red light on the video camera cast a faint pink glow into the silent space. Even though he counted on no one ever watching the videotape of what he was about to do, D’Onorio would have hooded the video camera with a plastic bag or some other material to obscure its view. There was always the chance that something would go wrong before he could remove the tape from the Diamond Center. D’Onorio didn’t want to take any unnecessary risks.

With the camera obscured, he flicked on the light switch and winced while his eyes adjusted to the stark fluorescent lighting. The LIPS door was locked tight for the night, a deceptively passive-looking barrier that he knew had the power to land him in prison if he made any mistakes. Seeing the magnetic alarm in person, after having studied it so intensely from videotape must have been gratifying. He examined its components from all angles for a few minutes to be sure there were no surprises.

From his workbag, he took the strange metal plate. It may have looked odd, but it was a central component of the heist. It was designed to fit perfectly across both magnets, positioned precisely between the upper and lower bolts that held the magnet to the door. It was a custom-made piece of metal that would keep both pieces of the alarm together while he worked to unbolt them. With a satisfying metallic clank, it stuck in place perfectly.

Next, D’Onorio produced a wrench from the bag and carefully unbolted each of the eight bolts that held the contraption in place. It was hard work. His arms were over his head and the bolts were old. He had to be very careful not to yank too hard and risk dislodging one of the magnets, which would set off the alarm.

If his work wiggled the magnets enough to break the connection and set off the alarm, D’Onorio wouldn’t have known it. There wouldn’t have been clanging bells or flashing lights, just an interruption of the signals transmitted to Securilink that D’Onorio wouldn’t be able to detect. He would know that he failed only if the stairwell door or the elevators opened and heavily armed cops spilled into the foyer. D’Onorio was used to dealing with the tension such work generated; deep in the bowels of the Diamond Center, subverting an alarm in the middle of the night, D’Onorio was in his element.

One by one, the long and sturdy bolts came out. When the last bolt came free, so did the entire contraption. But, though separated from where they’d been anchored to the door and the jamb, the magnets stayed connected to each other, thanks to the metal plate. They dangled from the flexible steel pipe that led into the ceiling. This apparatus could be moved a few inches to the side, far enough to allow the door to open when the time came to do so. The magnets still had to be handled with care, though, to ensure that the connection between them wasn’t jostled in even the slightest way, or Securilink would be notified immediately.

He had been successful in his first task, but D’Onorio was far from finished. So that the thieves wouldn’t have to repeat the laborious job of unbolting the magnets on the night of the heist, he used the hacksaw to shorten each bolt so that it would screw only into the magnets, and not their anchors in the door and the jamb. He then used heavy-duty double-sided tape to stick the magnets back into place where the bolts once held them. When he screwed in the shortened bolts and removed the metal plate, it was impossible to tell that tape, and not steel bolts, held the alarm in place. He’d been in the vault foyer for a long time, but he was satisfied knowing they wouldn’t have to take nearly as much time during the heist to get around the magnetic alarm.

D’Onorio took another look at his handiwork to be sure that nothing out of the ordinary would be noticed when the concierge came to open the vault for the day’s business in a few hours. Because they’d tested the holding strength of the tape, he wasn’t worried that the weight of the magnets would cause them to fall off from where they were anchored, but Notarbartolo would check nonetheless throughout the week to be sure they hadn’t moved. D’Onorio flipped off the lights, retrieved the shrouding material from the video camera, and slipped into the stairwell like a phantom. Only a careful inspection would reveal that he had not left everything behind him as he had found it.

Still, his long night wasn’t finished. D’Onorio exited the stairwell on the main level, sticking his head cautiously out into the hallway opposite the elevators, scanning for any sign of the concierge. Nothing. The video cameras recorded him as he slipped across the hall and peered down the corridor that led to C Block. Again, the coast was clear, so he tiptoed silently to the door leading to the parking garage.

As D’Onorio prepared to exit the Diamond Center through the garage, investigators would later theorize, he took a few moments to check some final details. He tested that the special key made in Turin specifically to open the C Block door from the parking deck worked properly. He confirmed Notarbartolo’s earlier observation that the key used to open and close the garage doors was permanently left in the opening mechanism.

And, according to one theory, he also removed from his workbag a frequency scanner. This simple battery-powered transmitter was connected to a circuit board and used to test all possible radio frequencies for the garage door until it hit on the correct one. Because the frequency was based upon the on or off positions of twelve toggle switches inside the garage door’s circuitry housing, there were 1,024 possible combinations. D’Onorio would know he’d found the right one when the garage door opened; he would then keep track of the code so that they could use it again to open the door remotely on the night of the heist. He had only to sit where he couldn’t be seen if the concierge made an unexpected visit to the garage, and let the scanner do all the work.

As much as he’d anticipated the noise the garage door would make, it was still a startling burst of sound; whether it was triggered by the scanner hitting on the right frequency or by the key opening it manually—the chain and pulley mechanism jolted to a start and the door began lumbering upward with a great metallic racket that ricocheted throughout the cavernous garage.

D’Onorio grabbed his workbag and hustled to the garage door. He looked around to be sure no one was watching, then turned left on Lange Herentalsestraat and walked swiftly down the sidewalk away from where the police kiosk stood just around the corner to the right.

Back at the apartment, D’Onorio was elated. His mission was a success on every front. While giving his report to the others, he tore the work order in his pocket into little pieces, along with a business card with his name on it. He’d been carrying both of these items in case he had been stopped while in the Diamond Center. He threw the remnants of both documents into the kitchen trash, where they scattered amid used coffee grounds and other household refuse.

There were other preparations afoot in Antwerp that week. Most of the gang members had arrived in the city the weekend before the heist. They came to Antwerp in separate groups, just as they would leave. Notarbartolo had flown to Brussels as he normally did, but some of the others drove, coming over Brenner Pass through the Alps between Italy and Austria on Sunday, February 9. In all, detectives believe at least seven people, and maybe more, were directly involved in the plot to rob the Diamond Center. Each had a different responsibility, from lookout to getaway driver. Not all of them have been identified.

They took care to arrive at Notarbartolo’s Charlottalei apartment without attracting attention; for more than two years, he had been a nearly anonymous tenant who was quiet as a mouse. The men were careful not to draw unnecessary attention to themselves as they crowded into the miniscule elevator and trudged down the cramped hallways, burdened with their bags of clothes, food, and equipment.

Police believe that some of the School of Turin members were tasked with perfecting their specialized safe deposit box tool in the days leading to the heist. They went to a few industrial areas on the outskirts of the city that were home to welding companies, machine shops, and scrap yards. Notarbartolo rented a car—not a flashy model like an Alfa, but a forgettable silver Peugeot sedan—because he planned that his baggage for the return trip to Italy would be far too valuable to risk bringing through airport security.

Otherwise, his job was simply to report to work in the Diamond Center as usual, and visit the vault daily to ensure that D’Onorio’s modifications to the magnetic alarm hadn’t been discovered. Had anyone at the Diamond Center been paying attention to his habits, they would have noted this as a huge change in Notarbartolo’s behavior. He’d visited the vault sporadically during the last two years, but in the week leading up to the heist he went to the vault twice daily. Notarbartolo was delighted to find that the Roman had done an excellent job; it was impossible even for him to tell that the bolts had been shortened and that simple tape kept the magnets in their place on the door and the doorframe.

During one of his later trips to the vault, Notarbartolo waited until all the other tenants had left and he was alone. Standing outside the range of the video camera, he removed an aerosol bottle from his attaché case and sprayed the lens of the motion detector. He gave it a good thick coating that went on clear and hardened into a sticky, opaque film, and then slid the can back into his case. Masking the motion detector had taken only a few seconds.