The Antwerp Diamond Heist

Antwerp, Belgium. The weekend of 15-16 February 2003. The Antwerp Diamond Centre vault — sixty metres below ground, behind a steel door three feet thick, protected by ten distinct security systems including heat sensors, Doppler radar, magnetic field detectors, and a combination dial requiring both a key and a code — is opened over a single weekend. One hundred and nine of its one hundred and eighty-nine private safe-deposit boxes are emptied. Estimated take: at least one hundred million dollars. The man behind it is Leonardo Notarbartolo. A jeweller from Turin. He had rented an office above the vault three years earlier and become, in every functional sense, a member of the building. He greeted the security guards by name. He brought them coffee. While he was visiting his own deposit box every week, he was studying the system from inside it. The team — known to Belgian investigators as the School of Turin — defeated all ten security layers. The polystyrene shield for the heat sensor. The hairspray for the motion detector. The duplicated keys. The watched combination. They walked out without triggering a single alarm. And then they drove an hour outside Antwerp and dumped their planning materials in plastic bags by the side of a forest road. A man walking his dog found the bags. Inside: surveillance plans, equipment, Notarbartolo's name on a receipt, and a half-eaten salami sandwich. The DNA on the sandwich became the prosecution's case. Maren and Ellis on two and a half years of patient infiltration, undone by five minutes of laziness in a forest.