Flawless: Inside the Largest Diamond Heist in History (26 page)

Once the detectives drove him to Charlottalei, Notarbartolo pointed to his apartment, hoping he’d given his friends enough time to clear out. Without backup, De Bot and Vanderkelen decided not to get out of the car. They didn’t want to walk into a trap if there was a lookout hidden on the street. They also didn’t want to risk Notarbartolo’s somehow making contact with the other suspects. Instead, they radioed for reinforcements and left to take Notarbartolo to police headquarters for further questioning.

For a few moments after they pulled away, there was no police presence outside of Charlottalei 33.

The final leg of the attempted escape from the apartment would have been comical had the moods of the escapees not been so dire. Three adults and two small children were jammed like sardines into the puny elevator with a rolled up carpet, several bags, luggage, and a home-cooked Italian dinner. After a painfully slow descent from the seventh floor, the elevator reached the ground floor.

It was at that same moment that the first police car pulled to the curb. Depending on the perspective, the timing was either perfect or abysmal.

Falleti, his family, and Crudo exited the elevator directly into the arms of the police, caught red-handed with a wealth of damning evidence.

Falleti, Zwiep, and their two small children were put into one police car, and Crudo in another. Notarbartolo had already been driven away in a third. None of them were placed under arrest, but they were all driven to the federal police building for questioning.

Still, however, the detectives were not finished racing the clock. So far, they were lucky to have made it to the Diamond Center before Notarbartolo grew suspicious enough of Boost’s stalling techniques to leave the building, and they’d captured Falleti and the others only moments before they would have vanished with valuable evidence. Now, however, they needed a warrant to search the apartment, and, if they didn’t have it in hand by 9:00 p.m., Belgian law prevented them from entering the building until the following day.

It was already 8:30 p.m. when they called the investigating judge, who was at home in a community outside Antwerp. The judge, however, did not have a fax machine or a home computer. He would have to write the warrant out by hand and someone from the local police would have to pick it up at his house and then fax it to the diamond detectives. If they couldn’t get the warrant in time, they would have to post guards outside the Charlottalei apartment overnight. But guards wouldn’t be able to prevent anyone from entering the building. If there was another accomplice in town who knew his colleagues had been detained, nothing would prevent him from walking past the police, entering the apartment, and flushing any remaining trace evidence down the toilet.

The detectives’ great fortune was still with them. De Bot’s sister was an officer on the police force in the judge’s community, and she was on duty that night. With blue lights flashing, she sped to his house to retrieve the warrant and then drove back to her police station. From there, she faxed the warrant to the diamond detectives.

While his sister was getting the warrant, De Bot revved his engine outside the police building, blue lights already flashing, ready to race off to deliver it to the apartment.

“The time was very short,” he later said, “Agim [De Bruycker] was waiting by the fax machine and I was waiting with the car downstairs.”

When the fax arrived, De Bruycker jumped in the elevator, ran out the glass doors of the police building, and stuffed the warrant into De Bot’s hand. De Bot floored it.

The handwritten search warrant arrived on the doorstep of Charlottalei 33 at 8:58 p.m.

Chapter Eleven

CHECKMATE

“Whether we fall by ambition, blood, or lust,
Like diamonds, we are cut with our own dust.”

—Duke Ferdinand,
The Duchess of Malfi
(1613–1614)

Leonardo Notarbartolo still thought he could talk his way free.

As far as he knew, it was possible that the detectives were simply being aggressive in their pursuit of additional witnesses. In Notarbartolo’s mind, there was nothing that tied him to the heist. He’d worn gloves during the break-in, and they’d been vigilant about destroying the videotapes and not leaving behind any trace of themselves. He knew that the garbage had been found, but was unaware the garbage included household trash that had led police straight to him.

Sitting at a table in a quiet interrogation room, Notarbartolo continued playing the part of the befuddled jeweler who didn’t understand why the police were interested in an innocent man such as himself. He needed to find the right combination of indignation and cooperation, if he was going to convince the detectives that they were making a big mistake.

This was precisely the demeanor Patrick Peys wanted him to adopt. As long as Notarbartolo felt there was an escape route, Peys could keep him talking—and, in talking, even about matters that might seem mundane, Notarbartolo might accidentally reveal something of importance.

“I first treated him not as a suspect, but more as a witness and somebody who might know some information,” Peys explained while recounting the details of this interrogation years later. “He was telling everything about what he was doing those days [surrounding the heist].”

Notarbartolo had an answer for everything. He rented the car, he said, after oversleeping and missing his flight to Italy. He stayed a few extra days in Antwerp in the hope of doing a little extra business and chose to drive home rather than fly. It might have seemed an odd decision considering the distance, but it was far from criminal.

Peys asked Notarbartolo why there were no records of him or his company conducting any business in the two years Damoros Preziosi had been in Antwerp. The company didn’t have a license application on file at the Ministry of Economy, a prerequisite to importing or exporting goods, or a record of any transactions through the Diamond Office. This, Peys said, seemed highly suspicious. Opting to take the fall for a small crime to avoid the larger one, Notarbartolo claimed that he dealt purely in black market diamonds to avoid taxes.

Peys switched gears, asking Notarbartolo why he was at the Diamond Center the night of his apprehension. “He [said he] had something to do in the office, which was bullshit because it was perfectly empty,” Peys said later. Plus, Notarbartolo didn’t have the keys to his office or his safe deposit box. The police had found those in his apartment.

That was correct, Notarbartolo countered when Peys pointed out the contradiction. He had only realized he’d left his keys behind once he’d stepped inside the front doors. It was then that he spotted Julie Boost and decided to ask about the heist. His explanation was a nimble maneuver in which he tried to turn Boost’s trap to his advantage.

Peys embarked on a different tack next, pointing out that Notarbartolo had been the last person in the vault the night before the heist. Notarbartolo said there had been another man in the vault when he’d left the last time, an Indian. The police had already analyzed the videotapes of that visit carefully; Peys knew it was a lie. The detective then asked Notarbartolo why he had taken so long to return to the Diamond Center to inquire about the heist. Notarbartolo explained that he’d emptied his safe deposit box of all his cash on his final trip to the vault and knew there had been nothing to steal.

The Italian had a valid answer for all but one of the detective’s probing questions: where he’d been on Saturday night, February 15. Notarbartolo said he’d made dinner alone in his apartment, watched some TV, and was in bed by midnight. As far as Peys was concerned, this was no alibi at all.

Hours ticked by as the detective took his time, drawing out their conversation in order to keep Notarbartolo talking. They were both polite and professional; this was part of their mutual façade to disarm each other, but for Peys it was practical as well.

“As a policeman you have to regard a person as neutrally as possible,” he said later, explaining why he didn’t simply confront Notarbartolo with the evidence against him. “You have to keep in mind that a person might be innocent. On the other hand, you have to be realistic. . . . If you have all kinds of evidence like that, and you have somebody who’s saying ‘I don’t have anything to do with it, I’m an honest businessman who did one and a half years [of business] in Antwerp’—which we didn’t find any [record] of—and who has a background of twenty years of burglary, well, we’re not judges; we’re just seeing what we have as evidence. And after a while, you realize that you are dealing with the right guy.”

Peys had gotten as far as he was going to with this line of questioning. Notarbartolo was unusually self-possessed, so the detective decided to try to rattle him to elicit a reaction. Since it was clear to Peys that Notarbartolo had no idea the police had been looking for him when he was apprehended at the Diamond Center earlier that night, Peys figured that Notarbartolo did not know that the police were also onto some of his accomplices. And so, in the middle of some light banter, the detective dropped Finotto’s old police mug shot in front of Notarbartolo. “Look, what do you think about that guy?” Peys asked as he planted the photo on the table. “Who is he?”

Even a detective as seasoned as Peys, who makes his living tracking down scam artists and con men, was surprised by Notarbartolo’s reaction. “He didn’t move a muscle,” Peys recalled, still impressed by the Italian’s poise years later. “He just acted as if he’d never seen the person. . . . Imagine that, a week after the burglary we show him a picture of one of the accomplices and say ‘this is the guy.’ I would really fall from my chair if you had that evidence during an interrogation. And he didn’t do
anything
. I can remember it so well because afterwards it seems so illogical and so unreal.”

In fact, Notarbartolo held his act together so well that Peys momentarily doubted that Finotto was involved. “We were absolutely not sure that Finotto was involved in that crime,” Peys said. “Okay, Finotto was involved ten years ago [in the failed bank heist] and Finotto, according to the information from the Italians, knew Notarbartolo, but that doesn’t mean anything. I mean, [the School of Turin] is perhaps fifteen, twenty, twenty-five people who only work together when it’s necessary. Afterward, we knew Finotto was involved, but at that moment I didn’t know.”

After that, it was clear Notarbartolo wasn’t going to slip up and accidentally divulge anything of importance. Peys played his last remaining move, telling Notarbartolo directly that the detectives believed he was involved in the crime. Just as Peys suspected, it brought the interrogation to an abrupt halt.

“He said very politely—because he was always very polite—he said, ‘Okay, I’m not going to say anything anymore, you do whatever you like,’” Peys recalled. “And since then he hasn’t spoken another word regarding the case with us.”

Investigators had more luck talking to Falleti, who was eager to convince police of his innocence so that he could take his wife and daughters home. Before his questioning, the detectives had allowed the family to share an awkward meal, finally eating the food they’d brought from the Netherlands in the police lunchroom under the watchful eyes of an officer. They were all nervous and scared and barely spoke. Falleti was then forced to leave his children in the cafeteria with a cop while he and his wife were taken away for questioning.

Interviewed separately, Falleti and Zwiep both maintained their innocence, telling the detectives they were only in Antwerp to enjoy a farewell meal with old friends. They claimed to know nothing of the heist beyond what they’d seen in the news; they said they knew nothing whatsoever about Notarbartolo’s involvement in it.

The detectives weren’t entirely clear on how this couple fit into the crime but assumed that at the very least they were accessories after-the-fact who were at the apartment specifically to rid it of evidence. Falleti had been caught holding the rug that, on close inspection back at the forensics lab, yielded the tiny emeralds the thieves had accidentally dropped while tallying the loot. And they had been accompanying Crudo, who was carrying a striped shopping bag and a large purse containing a cordless drill, three flashlights, the small purse with the hole cut out for Notarbartolo’s video camera, and a used vacuum cleaner bag. This last item was filled with dirt, dust, and “very small ‘glass fragments,’” according to Peter Kerkhof, the forensic technician who collected and examined evidence in the case. When he later examined these glass fragments more closely, he realized they weren’t glass at all. Instead, he labeled them as “possible emeralds.”

The detectives’ real score was their discovery of two SIM cards in Crudo’s purse, one labeled
mio
(“mine” in Italian), and the other labeled
non mio
. Detectives loved to find SIM cards on their suspects, since they were full of information, such as the dates, times, and phone numbers of calls sent and received, as well as where the cell phones had been used.

As if the possession of these items wasn’t incriminating enough, Falleti had admitted to the police on the scene that he intended to throw the rug away, which suggested to them that he knew he was disposing of evidence.

If in fact Falleti and Zwiep were the cleaners, they were woefully unprepared for the job and incompetent to boot. While the suspects were being interrogated, De Bruycker and a team of forensic specialists were going over every inch of the dreary Charlottalei apartment. They found all sorts of valuable clues, but also evidence that the “cleaners” hadn’t had time to clean a thing. Falleti and Zwiep had left their fingerprints all over the place, including Falleti’s on a grappa bottle and a glass. Detectives also found a used tissue in the apartment that was later revealed to have his DNA. The couple had showed up in Antwerp to perform their alleged role in the heist without any bleach, gloves, disinfectants, or other cleaning supplies but with their young children in tow. It was an odd scenario, to be sure.

Falleti and Zwiep tried to convince the police that they were simply helping Crudo at a time when she was concerned about her husband’s welfare. When she asked them to take out some trash on their way downstairs, it didn’t occur to them to question her. “Everything went so fast, I was not curious why I was needed to help carry everything downstairs,” Falleti told detectives.

It was a reasonable story, but the police weren’t buying it. They decided to hold the couple, so their DNA could be compared with samples from items from the trash at the Floordambos and recovered from the vault. Plus, their statements to police differed in one critical way that made the detectives question the rest of their story: when asked where he was on Sunday night, February 16, Falleti said he had been at a friend’s birthday party while Zwiep said they had been at home that night.

Crudo also had a lot to explain since her baggage was filled with suspicious items, and she admitted being the one who suggested gathering everything up and fleeing the apartment. She told the police that she had panicked when she learned from Falleti that police were questioning Notarbartolo, presumably in connection with the diamond heist.

It was no secret that her husband had a long history of problems with the police and she told the detectives she didn’t want to risk leaving anything in the apartment that could give investigators the wrong impression of a man she described as honorable and law-abiding. She too was held over for additional questioning.

All four of the suspects were placed in solitary confinement cells in the basement of the federal police building. Zwiep was unable to reach a relative in the Netherlands to come for their children, so they ended up as prisoners of a sort as well. The police took them to Paola Kinderziekenhuis, a children’s hospital. The girls spent the night standing at the window, hoping someone would appear to take them home.