The Antwerp Diamond Heist

Over the weekend of 15-16 February 2003, in the diamond district of Antwerp, someone opened a vault that the world's insurance underwriters had agreed could not be opened. The vault was sixty metres below ground, behind a steel door three feet thick, protected by ten distinct security systems. Inside it were one hundred and eighty-nine private safe-deposit boxes leased by the diamond traders working in the buildings above. By the time the staff returned on Monday morning, one hundred and nine of those boxes had been emptied. The total value of what had been removed has never been confirmed precisely. The lowest published estimate is one hundred million United States dollars. The highest is over three hundred million.

The man inside the building

The operation was led by Leonardo Notarbartolo, an Italian jeweller from Turin. He had not, in any conventional sense, broken into the Antwerp Diamond Centre. He had been a tenant of the building since 2000. He held a working office on a floor above the vault, traded actual diamonds, attended the building's annual events, and brought coffee to the security staff. He held a personal safe-deposit box in the vault and visited it regularly. By 2003, he was, to anyone in the building, a familiar figure.

His team — known to Belgian Federal Police as the School of Turin — included a lock specialist, an electronics specialist, and a sensor specialist. Notarbartolo was the planner. The team had spent two and a half years studying the vault's security from inside it. They had measured. They had timed. They had, by Belgian investigators' subsequent account, watched the vault's combination dial being opened so often that they could read the muscle memory of the staff who used it.

The ten systems

The vault was protected by a magnetic field sensor on the door, a heat sensor monitoring body warmth, a Doppler radar motion detector, a light sensor, a combination dial requiring both a numerical code and a unique key, four separate door locks (two of them recessed and one operable only from inside the vault), continuous CCTV with off-site recording, pressure plates on the floor, and seismic sensors. The team defeated all of them. The heat sensor was blocked with a polystyrene shield held in front of the body. The motion sensor was sprayed with hairspray, which fogged the lens enough to disable detection without triggering the tamper alarm. The combination dial was watched and replicated. The keys had been duplicated from impressions taken on previous office visits. The CCTV had been rerouted by the electronics specialist before entry. They worked through the weekend.

They opened one hundred and nine boxes. They sorted the contents by category — diamonds, gold, bearer bonds, cash. They left some items they considered too identifiable. They closed each box and reset its dial position. They walked out. They got into a vehicle. They drove out of Antwerp. The total weekend produced what is still considered the largest single diamond theft in European history.

The forest

Two and a half years of preparation came undone in five minutes near a forest road in Floriffoux, in Wallonia, about an hour outside Antwerp. The team needed to dispose of the materials accumulated over the years of planning — surveillance documents, equipment, lists, the polystyrene shield, several aerosol cans, and miscellaneous detritus that they could not be caught with. They placed everything in plastic bags and drove out into the forest at night. The bags were not buried. They were not burned. They were not weighted and sunk. They were dumped beside a forest road.

Several days later, a local resident walking his dog came across the bags. Inside were detailed surveillance plans of the Antwerp Diamond Centre, an office key, a deposit-box receipt, a photograph of Notarbartolo, and a half-eaten salami sandwich. He called the police.

The sandwich

The Belgian Federal Police's Diamond Squad submitted the sandwich to the lab. The bite mark on the sandwich carried saliva. The saliva carried DNA. The DNA matched Notarbartolo, who by that point had been identified as a person of interest through the documents in the same bag. The case was made primarily on the contents of the bag. The sandwich was, in effect, the prosecution's exhibit one.

The trial

Notarbartolo was tried at the Court of Antwerp in February 2005. He was convicted of the theft and sentenced to ten years. His co-defendants were convicted in connection with the wider operation and received sentences of approximately five years each. Less than two percent of what was taken from the vault has ever been recovered. The remaining diamonds, gold, and bearer bonds entered the unregulated end of the global market — diamonds in particular are recut and resold without provenance — and have never reappeared in any catalogue.

Notarbartolo, in subsequent interviews from prison, has at various points claimed the heist was an insurance fraud commissioned by a diamond dealer. Belgian investigators dismissed the claim. There is no version of the story, in any of his accounts, that explains the bag in the forest.

The asymmetry is what stays with anyone who reads the file. Two and a half years of patience inside the building. Five minutes of laziness on a forest road. Both decisions were made by the same man.

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Listen to the full story on The Vault, Episode 7. Stream the episode here.