Original subtitles

This is my city...

Antwerp...

...the city of diamonds.

Thieves in Belgium are thought to have got away

with diamonds worth millions of pounds.

...in what could be the biggest diamond heist in history.

No one could actually imagine

that the diamond district could be cracked.

How they did it... we had no idea.

No force, no violence.

And as much as 300 million US dollars is gone.

The only leads that we had just seemed quite a normal man,

dressed just to blend in.

Gems were taken from the world's

largest diamond distribution center in Antwerp.

We were on the hunt...

...for a mastermind.

Monday, the 17th of February, 2003.

A normal Monday morning.

I arrived at the office.

Most of the time, we start with a cup of coffee.

But I saw Patrick sitting there, ready to leave.

So I said, "Oh, no time for coffee, Patrick?"

And he said, "No, I don't think so. We got a call from the diamond district."

"There has been a burglary."

"A safe has been broken open."

You have to realize that 85% of diamonds worldwide

are passing in one way or another through Antwerp.

They call it the diamond capital.

The main streets in the diamond district

are the Rijfstraat, the Hoveniersstraat, and the Schupstraat.

Billions of dollars of goods are lying in those three streets,

spread in the different vault rooms in the diamond district.

This little square,

that is the Diamond Center, where the burglary took place.

In the building, you have 13 floors up

with 225 diamond trading offices.

Most of the dealers were storing their diamonds into the vault room.

But then, when we were entering by car into the diamond district...

Something serious was going on.

Immediately, we were blocked with a lot of dealers

trying to find out whether their diamonds, gold, or money was gone.

When we saw the panic,

we realized here we are not talking about a little theft in a diamond company.

No, this is... this is something else.

So, we went down in the elevator...

and I think I can speak for myself.

I was struck by lightning.

I saw a door, the biggest door I ever saw,

a steel door,

which was at least 30 centimeters, a foot thick.

-But the door was standing open. -Open.

Wide open.

A metal gate was blocked with a bucket of paint.

And when we stepped inside the vault room...

Throughout the walls that we could see,

they were covered with individual lockers.

And we immediately saw

that the majority of these, uh, individual safe deposit boxes were...

...cracked and opened.

And I was standing in front of Ali Baba's cave.

The scale of it must have been like millions,

because every month, you have diamonds that are mined from De Beers

in Namibia or South Africa,

were shipped to London by plane

and then loaded onto a smaller plane

and shipped from London to the Antwerp Airport.

From there, those shipments of diamonds were brought with armored trucks

to the dealers of the diamond district...

...who buy a monthly quantity of diamonds.

So in the building of Diamond Center,

there were diamond dealers

that were, that week, receiving diamonds from De Beers.

Also important was that that weekend was the yearly tennis tournament

called the Diamond Games.

The prize, by the way, was a golden racket

with diamonds all over,

funded by the diamond area.

A lot of diamond dealers would be present.

So, at that moment, Antwerp was bursting with diamonds.

One of our main questions is how the hell that the robbers got into this building.

You have here the entrance of the diamond area,

located in the heart of Antwerp and regarded as being our Fort Knox.

Inside the building, there were 24 cameras working day in, day out.

For each day of the month, there was a cassette.

But the videocassette of the 15th and the 16th February,

the weekend and the night of the heist, were missing.

I said, "Okay, I'm going to call the security company

and ask them when the alarm was set off."

And, uh, he said, "No, sir, the alarm did not go off."

"The... the safe is still closed."

And I said, "Yeah, this is strange,

because I'm actually standing in the vault room."

"The door is wide open behind me,

and you tell me that the alarm is still on."

It's crazy.

Once this vault door is open,

they had to handle the motion detector, the heat detector, the light detector.

We made an attempt to start with our, uh, fingerprint investigation,

commencing with the motion sensors,

which were manipulated by the suspects.

It was sprayed with a kind of product,

we assumed it was a hairspray,

which makes sure that the surface is not smooth enough

for the use of fingerprint powder.

So we didn't have any results that could be used in the investigation.

The next sensor we took to have an investigation on was this light sensor,

which was attached to the ceiling, covered with black duct tape.

Again, here, we didn't find any fingerprints on the pieces of tape.

I was impressed. My colleagues were impressed.

It was flawlessly executed.

Because of the importance of the diamond trade in Antwerp,

there was immediately a lot of pressure of international press...

They managed to get by extremely heavy security in the building,

which houses dozens of gem trading companies.

...of politicians...

And the politicians put pressure on the magistrates.

And because of that, there was a pressure...

...of my own superiors...

...but also from the diamond area.

It's a huge blow for the companies involved...

I was thinking, this must be an inside job.

So you had the security guard, you had two concierges,

and then you had the building manager.

We started investigating very thoroughly on this group.

We started interrogating them. We did house searches.

But in the end, we had to clear them all.

We had no idea who was responsible for this crime.

And then suddenly, in the afternoon, I get a telephone call.

My husband August and me, we had a general store.

I was cleaning the shop that Monday.

And the radio was on.

And I heard the news

that there was a heist in the Diamond Center in Antwerp.

We cautiously estimate €100 million of loot in diamonds...

August drove to a part of the woods that we own

with some vegetable scraps,

to feed the rabbits and the fish.

And when he entered the woods,

he said, "Goddamn it, they did it again. People dumped their trash again."

A lot of people went there with trash.

They took a little road to our woods,

where they were hidden from sight.

And then the trash got dumped.

So my husband opened the bags.

There were a lot of torn-up papers.

So he started puzzling...

Antwerp...

Diamonds...

And he thought, oh, this is serious.

This isn't for me.

And then he came home mad.

He came in, and I immediately could tell something was wrong.

I saw it on his face.

But I didn't get the chance to ask.

He had the phone in his hands straightaway to call the police.

That call...

...changed everything.

There were all packages of diamonds.

You have those special papers that are used to wrap diamonds in.

We call it in Flemish "Briefke."

We saw some very small, tiny, green emerald stones that were left.

We saw also banknotes that were torn up.

Tools, wrenches, flashlights.

A glove that was left behind.

A sport bag.

Even parts of a bond which referred to the diamond area.

But there was also other stuff.

Because when all that material came to our office,

we were laying it out on a big table in our conference room.

And there was wine, there was cheese, there was pasta,

even a half-eaten salami sandwich.

This was strange, because I don't think that they had a picnic in the vault room.

So some of the rubbish is clearly from the vault room,

but then the kitchen rubbish probably came from a hideout.

And they took everything and left it at Floordambos.

This is another critical piece of evidence that we found in the woods.

You see here the carton boxes

where they keep the video cassettes for the footage in Diamond Center.

But the tape was removed from all these cassettes.

So what did we do? We thought, okay, the case happened in Antwerp,

rubbish was left in Vilvoorde.

There's actually, between Antwerp and Brussels,

you only have that highway.

So let's do a screening of the whole highway

and see whether they were removing the tape

during their car journey.

So we asked the police academy to send a class of students.

It's about 40-50 kilometers. They had to walk it.

And they collected two or three bags full of tape.

So we sent it to a logistics center of Sony in Brussels,

and we asked them...

...whether they could reinstall this tape on a black video cassette

so that we could see what was on it.

Later on, when one of the colleagues came back from the headquarters of Sony

with this cassette in his hands...

We had all the investigators together.

Also my superiors.

And then he puts in that cassette.

The film starts...

...and it was a porn movie.

I've never been so disappointed in a porn movie as I was then.

There was a lot of pressure.

In the morning, it was only the Diamond Squad with six people

that was working on this investigation.

By the evening, the team was expanded to 20 detectives

that were full-time working on this case.

When I became the commander, I was 28-29, which is young.

At the time of the heist, I was still only 33.

So it was a lot to handle for me to get immediately 20 detectives.

A lot of them had more experience and were much older than myself.

I had to get results.

It was really like a big puzzle with all the pieces,

but in the wrong order.

I'm a simple police officer, so for me,

this was something like in the movies.

We put everything on the conference table in the middle of our, uh, floor.

And we saw immediately that there were a lot of papers,

a lot of ripped papers.

We started to piece together,

and at a certain moment, we see that some pieces are fixing.

On one of the pieces, he saw "Schupstraat."

And Schupstraat is the street where the building Diamond Center is located.

So he started to re-puzzle and reconstruct that whole document.

This is the document that Gerry reassembled.

And like you see, it was torn in different pieces.

First of all, we noticed that the document is in Italian.

You see the title here?

"Commessa di lavoro," which means "working order."

So we see that it's a working order...

...to place a security system in an office.

An office located...

...at Schupstraat 911...

...which is exactly the address of the building of Diamond Center.

And this document is issued by...

...the Italian diamond company named...

...Damoros Preziosi.

Damoros Preziosi.

So with this document, we went to the building manager in Diamond Center

and asked her whether it's correct that Damoros Preziosi

was one of the companies that was located in the building.

She told us that indeed it was,

but that also locker 149 belonged to the company Damoros Preziosi.

Nothing wrong at that moment,

but that specific locker hadn't been burglared.

So how did that company's document end up in the rubbish at Floordambos

if the locker of that company had never been cracked open?

So our next request was to do a search in that office.

And we also took with us the building manager.

The office was empty.

The desks were empty. The cupboards were empty.

An office that was rented for more than two years

and had never been used.

The building manager didn't know the man very well,

but she could tell us that it was an Italian businessman...

...of whom she had no address, no other references.

So we decided to check the rest of the videotapes...

...to watch people leaving the building with the building manager.

Eventually she was able to point out, "Okay, this is your guy."

He just seemed quite a normal man, middle-aged...

dressed just to blend in and not to be noticed.

He looked like many of these people

that are walking in and out of these buildings constantly.

We started inquiring in the building with the guards,

with the concierges, with even other renters.

And they all could tell us the same. "We know him, but he never speaks."

"He's like a gray mouse in the area."

"He's there, and when you see him, ten minutes later,

you forgot that you met him."

The building manager gave us the records.

And his name was Leonardo Notarbartolo.

So we immediately asked ourselves...

could this be the mastermind behind the heist?

Leonardo...

do you like diamonds?

Yes, very much.

It's a passion that has developed gradually.

As I was stealing them,

I grew closer to them.

So were you the mastermind of the Antwerp heist?

No.

I was born in Palermo, towards the mountains.

As a little kid of just six years old,

I broke into the house of this cowherd.

I saw 5,000 lire,

and I took the money, folded it, and went downstairs.

My father would always tell me,

"Remember that what you do will have consequences,

and you have to accept them."

So, I am a participant.

But I'm not the mastermind behind the Antwerp heist.

Leonardo, interview, take one.

In the '80s, I opened my first jewelry shop.

Then later I owned another one.

Then I opened the third one in the '90s.

Logically,

I started going back and forth to Antwerp to buy gemstones.

I started to come frequently to Antwerp,

and I rented out an apartment

because it's the world capital of diamonds.

It's one of the most strategic points,

on top of Tel Aviv,

on top of New York,

on top of London.

My goal was to get an office in Antwerp,

in the Diamond Center,

to gain the confidence of the big diamond suppliers.

So I turned up.

I had to give them all my Italian documentation

about my business, where I had my office.

They said, "Okay."

"We'll do our checks

and research, then we'll tell you."

And the week after, they accepted me.

They let me open up the office there.

Leonardo, the Belgian police are convinced that

you rented the office in the Diamond Center

in order to do this heist. Did you?

No, absolutely not.

I didn't. I went there to work.

Did you know that there was a vault inside the Diamond Center?

Yes, sure. I knew it.

I knew the building had a vault with safe deposit boxes.

You had to apply for it, and eventually they'd say,

"If you want it, there's one available."

That's what happened to me.

Not immediately.

After a few months, one came up,

and I got it.

So who was the mastermind behind the heist?

His name was Alessandro.

I mean, he went by Alessandro.

It probably wasn't his real name.

He told me, "We met in Italy."

And he asked, "Can we have a coffee together?"

He said, "I know very well who you are."

"You could do something for me,

for a group of mine,

"and we'll give you loads of money."

"I'll give you a Biro... a pen."

"This pen, it has a tiny little camera here."

"It could store 1,000 photos."

"Take photos of your vault for me."

"And if it's all as it should be,

I'll give you 100,000 dollars."

Of course, there was some wariness in the approach, you know?

Were you scared?

Of course, I was scared in that moment. But that's normal.

Those who don't have fear aren't normal.

Fear must exist.

And I said, "Okay...

I'm in."

When I went into the Diamond Center...

...I put the pen into my jacket pocket.

There was downright obsessive monitoring of the place.

If I was found with the little camera, you understand,

I would immediately be reported and kicked out of my workplace.

So from there, I framed up the whole hallway of the Diamond Center.

I take the stairs and go down to the vault.

I ring. I'm behind the door.

Of course, the concierge sees me and lets me in.

I expect they want to see the layout of the boxes.

Are there any open?

Strategic points,

there were the video cameras, the two sensors...

Clearly, I had a lot of anxiety inside me.

I tried to move in a way

that the pics would be as clear as possible.

I opened my box,

as anyone else would do.

Then I turn around very slowly,

and I head for the door.

I take the lift and go back to my office.

And so, we met again.

I gave him the pen.

He said...

"Leonardo..."

I don't want to speak for you, but why settle for this sum

"when there's a lot more money to gain?"

"Approximately, there's $100 million worth of goods."

"That's ten or 15 million each."

"That's the least you would make."

"What do you think about taking part?"

And I said, "Yes."

So you said "yes" straightaway?

I said yes, because...

I'd always wanted

to be part of something like this.

I mean, the whole thing was getting too tempting.

Fifteen million... I truly started thinking I could solve a lot of problems.

And until that point, you had no idea who else was involved?

No, not then.

As soon as we had Mr. Notarbartolo's name...

we took contact with our Italian counterparts,

and asked whether that gentleman had any previous conviction or whatever.

After a few hours, we received the information

that Mr. Notarbartolo was a well-known criminal in Italy...

...and that he was convicted for burglary, for heist,

for diamond theft, or jewelry theft at least,

and they thought he was living somewhere in Turin.

Next, we got a very interesting call

from a colleague from our same department

about a kind of a similar burglary that took place six years before.

First of all, it was an attempt on a vault room,

where the perpetrator rented an individual locker.

Second of all, he was pretending to be a diamond dealer,

located in the Diamond Center.

Our colleague said, "I still have a file about it,"

and the guy that was arrested in that case was also from the city Turin,

"and his name was Ferdinando Finotto."

There was an arrest warrant for Ferdinando Finotto,

but they could not find him anymore in Belgium.

So we had no idea where they were,

but our best guess at that point was maybe there is a lead to Italy,

and it could be like an Italian gang

that especially came to Belgium to commit this crime.

So, immediately, we were put in contact

with the head of that Squadra Mobile in Turin.

He told us that...

In Turin, the presence of a number of individuals

specializing in thefts from banks and bank vaults

has created, as coined by journalists essentially,

a school of thieves, "The School of Turin."

Our very first reaction was,

"What the fuck is 'The School of Turin'?"

"Do you have actually a school of criminals here in Turin?"

Mr. Martino explained that it was a bunch of people,

each of them was specialized in some form of criminal behavior.

So they picked who they needed according to his or her specialty.

In Turin, the presence of the metalworking industry of Fiat...

meant that the skills for working with metal

were more advanced than in other cities.

Certainly, these people knew how to work metals well.

They understood the mechanics of vaults and fortified walls.

Having so many specialized individuals

concentrated in such a small area as Turin

led to the creation of this term, "The School of Turin."

It made a lot of sense to us.

Certainly, given the way the thieves had tackled all these security systems,

The School of Turin probably had the knowledge

to do this kind of crime.

Alessandro told me, "We're meeting the other guys."

We go to an industrial area

where there are warehouses.

I go inside. There are three people there.

Alessandro does the introductions.

With fictitious names, obviously.

The first guy was a master

when it came to locks and alarms.

A pretty boy!

Looks like a film star.

He's 1.93-meters tall.

Well-built.

That's why I call him The Monster.

The other one, The Genius.

He was a little man.

Really, really, really smart. Really intelligent.

He was half hacker and half computer geek

and an expert in alarms.

Then there's the one that seems a bit of a thug,

a bit coarse.

A very calm and quiet person.

He can open any door in the world.

He can open any lock.

-What did you call him? -The Key Master.

Was that the whole team?

Were there no others?

No, there wasn't anyone else there.

-No? -No.

Who was the boss?

The boss for the whole time was Alessandro.

They pull down these big plastic sheets.

And I see this place which looks just like the vault.

I say, "Bloody hell! It's exactly the same!"

They say, "Are the two video cameras positioned correctly?"

"Yes."

"Is the central one correctly positioned?"

"Yes."

"Is the little sensor right?" "Yes."

"How does the central one seem?"

I say, "It's identical."

"You made it the exact same."

Do you think your wife could have ever dreamed

that you'd gotten yourself into something so big?

Absolutely not. She would have never thought that I...

I'd get into such a situation, a theft of this kind.

No, absolutely not.

My wife and I have known each other since I was 17

and she was 14-15 years old.

I went into the police force when I was 19.

I did not do so well in secondary school, actually.

My mother said, at a certain point,

"You know what? When you're 19, you still have opportunities."

"There are still chances in life."

"There is a job center nearby,

and there will be representatives of the police force

to see whether you are interested. Let's go there together."

And I thought, oh no, I'm not going to join the police force.

This is not it for me.

Since the first time I decided

what to do with my life,

I told her the truth. I said, "Look, I'm a little crazy."

"Be aware that I might end up in trouble."

Of course, I don't involve her in what I do, or what I plan to do,

not at all, no.

I hide it from her. I try not to give her this grief.

I learned a lot from that.

You need to put yourself aside

and not think that you are the smartest guy.

Once you think that you are Sherlock Holmes or James Bond,

then it will go wrong.

If we were correct that Notarbartolo was the mastermind...

...renting his office for more than two years,

obviously, he would have needed a place to, uh, to stay.

That is clear.

We checked the hotels, and on the name of Mr. Notarbartolo

we could find no name, and we checked all the hotels in Antwerp.

Whether he was staying then in an apartment or in a... in a house,

that was not clear to us.

We also hadn't worked out how,

on the night of the heist,

he got his gang into the building without leaving any traces,

as far as we could see.

That security guard's office is always open

between 7:00 a.m. and 7:00 p.m.

After that, they go home.

So the weak point was the entrance of the garage,

which was on the Lange Herentalsestraat.

When you are into the garage, there is a connecting door

that leads you directly into the building on the ground floor.

In Floordambos, in the rubbish,

we found an Allen key that was modified,

and we tried it on that particular door in the garage...

...and it was easy to open the door with that modified key.

They think we came in through the garage,

that we went in underneath the Diamond Center,

and from there to the vault.

No! No!

They really don't know.

They were coming in and out of that place like a Swiss cheese.

To make copies of the keys, to check things, and so on.

So in your opinion, how many times did they go in?

Thirty.

-Thirty? -At least 30 times.

And never left a trace.

We, as you know, conducted an interview

with Mr. Notarbartolo.

He claims, in fact, that the gang went in multiple times, up to 30 times,

for months and months and months before the heist.

The fact that they made reconnaissance missions,

uh, that makes sense to me, yes, that makes sense to me.

Every few months,

we would go and study something and report it the following day.

We entered from Pelikaanstraat,

where the car park is,

a place where you could park cars behind the Diamond Center.

By skirting along the walls of the Diamond Center,

we arrived right at our building.

And we went up with a stepladder that we brought with us, the folding ones.

He claimed they did not go in through the garage,

that they had found a building site behind the Diamond Center

and gained access direct into the Diamond Center.

On which floor then?

We climbed up to the first floor.

The Genius had bypassed the alarm that was on this balcony.

Was it with that same modified key

that they could open the door?

Because that key was fitting perfectly on the door of the garage downstairs then.

Yes, he had the key.

The key that had been prepared by The Key Master.

And from there, we entered.

The biggest problem we had was the door

with its three obstacles.

The lock, that is the key,

the combination, and the alarm.

The biggest problem to resolve, clearly, was the combination.

So the combination dial on... on the... the safe door

was changed weekly,

and that dial would give you a hundred million possibilities.

You see in the movies often these guys are using stethoscope

to make sure that they find the correct code.

Well, specialists told me that this is impossible.

It will take you days or weeks to find it.

When The Genius

realized there was a light bulb above the door,

he told me,

"Let's place a micro camera above it."

Makes sense. That makes sense.

We had to find a way to transmit the images.

We couldn't place a receiver there.

The only way was to find a spot where to hide it.

And that spot was in the boiler room, which had some fire extinguishers.

Fire extinguisher. Okay.

Okay.

Placing the camera is, let's say, not impossible.

Placing a recorder in a fire extinguisher, because there was one, that's correct,

uh, that's a different story.

I mean, how are you going to do that in reality?

We're not talking about movies.

The Genius took one, he made photos,

checked how it was made,

and, in Italy, we modified one,

cutting the bottom and inserting a receiver inside.

Every evening, when the concierge went down to close up

and he inserted the combination,

we had the recordings.

The camera was also needed to measure up the key.

We could see every frame as the concierge inserted it.

We'd take a still shot, and we could see the key's size and structure.

Now, we know from experience that it's possible

to place a very small camera

to see somebody, for example, who is, uh, taking money from a bank.

You can film it, and you can film the code.

But we're talking about the year 2003.

Batteries of a cell phone, for example, it lasted one day.

Batteries of a camera, a few hours, a video camera.

Yeah, okay, fine.

That part, according to me, is again the category bullshit.

Five days after the... the heist,

the details of the evidence that was found in Floordambos,

and the details of those two names that already came to our attention,

had to stay out of the press, so that those guys stayed in the dark.

The Antwerp judicial service provided more information

about last week's major diamond heist.

For example, the videocassettes

from the night of the heist were gone,

and the international press was already reporting about this event.

The video cassettes from the weekend of the 15th and 16th

have disappeared.

But what was much more interesting

was that the videocassette of the 10th February,

which was a Monday before the theft,

was also gone.

That raises questions.

If they were interested in that specific cassette of the 10th, Monday,

probably preparations were done and caught on camera on the 10th.

Next, there was another piece of evidence found from the rubbish in Floordambos,

which was an envelope,

and the name said "Elio D'Onorio," with an address close to Rome.

We found out that Elio D'Onorio is a specialist,

an alarm specialist,

and known as an Italian criminal too.

I remember that document that we found in Floordambos,

which was a working order to work on alarm systems on cameras.

Probably, this document is used as a cover

to get people in Diamond Center

to work on that vault door.

Imagine that a tenant would ask any questions,

they could say, like, "No problem."

"We have a working order,

and we need to, uh, fix the alarm here," for example.

Uh, that is the reason why this document was created by Damoros Preziosi.

We had Leonardo Notarbartolo,

Ferdinando Finotto,

and we had a third Italian name, Elio D'Onorio,

who, according to Marco Martino, were all related to The School of Turin.

So, together with our Italian colleagues,

everywhere where there was a possibility to hide was searched.

But actually, we had no idea whether they were in Italy,

still in Belgium, or somewhere else in the world.

Because there are so many possibilities to leave Antwerp.

-The train... -Diamonds are easy to transport.

Also.

You can bring them to international markets

all over the world and sell them immediately.

Um, so, we feared, actually, that we lost, uh, the... the diamonds.

It was one of our main fears, actually.

Time was running out. We knew that.

But where to start? At that moment, very difficult.

Explain to me how you chose the specific day.

We didn't choose a day.

We'd reached a point where it's been going on for two years.

Sooner or later, someone will start asking questions.

The only remaining worry was a sensor inside the vault

which was a bit more sophisticated than the other ones.

Alessandro told me, "Look,

we still need a bit more."

"We'd like to have more angles."

"I'll give you a small camera..."

"...I'll give you a little bag, and I'll tell you how to do it."

I go towards the boxes.

I pretend I'm stretching like this...

pointing the camera upwards...

trying to keep it pointing to the center.

In comes the security guard. He asked, "Are you unwell?"

"Do you have a problem?"

I tried to say my side hurt.

I felt a bit off, so I leaned on something.

"Okay, fine."

And so talking it through between us, one told me

that once he had tried

to fog up a sensor using hairspray,

and it had worked.

So three days before the heist, I was asked to eliminate it.

Were you not scared they could see you when you did that?

Of course I was scared someone would come downstairs.

But the cameras could not see me.

The camera on the side was already after the sensor.

It aimed to the other side.

I went alongside the wall with my hand.

I fit perfectly.

So basically I have three nights to see that the hairspray did not get darker,

because every morning, they enter to clean the vault.

On closer inspection of the rubbish from Floordambos

where we found this receipt on 14th of February,

which is Friday evening before the heist,

on 5:30 p.m.,

someone was buying...

...from Brico,

a hardware store located in Mechelen between Antwerp and Brussels...

...different items that were used in the robbery.

For example, we see here "ragebol,"

an extendable mop that was found in the vault room.

So we had a drawer from the federal police

who made an Identi-Kit picture

showing one of the, uh, people

that bought that material in the hardware store.

Sometimes on a case, you get a feeling.

We were getting closer.

They were only just out of our reach.

Come Saturday... we decided to do it that evening.

If not, it's over.

Why Saturday?

Saturday is the Sabbath for Jewish people, and they don't go into the office.

The day of the hit,

they decided to have me stay outside.

So they told me,

"Who could be better than you,

who has known the environment for so many years,

who has studied it actively for three years?"

"You know the policemen."

"Maybe you'll spot them in plain clothes. You never know."

On one side, it was disappointing, as I would have liked to be inside.

And on the other side, I understood that what they said made sense.

It was not just to get rid of me. Why would they want to get rid of me?

On the day of the heist, Mr. Notarbartolo says

he was told by the gang

that, in fact, he was not to go into the vault himself.

It's possible.

On the other hand, you have to think that he was the only one

that in reality knew the building inside out.

-So he might be lying? -Uh, it's one of his habits, I suppose.

One by one, we set off from my apartment.

In the final act, in the end, how many are you?

We four were the main ones.

The Monster, the Genius, the Key Master, and I.

The fifth was "My Friend."

He had excellent qualities in our line of work.

But they had to wait for me to arrive by car.

I would park alongside, and then they came to the door,

and I gave them the equipment I had to pass to them, all suitcases.

So they got in and, as usual, they ran along the wall.

Once there, they put the stepladder up and got in.

From that moment, I turned around again and went to the park.

From that position, I could see the police cabin...

and I could see the main door of our building.

This is a model of the floor of the vault,

looking exactly as it was.

They had to walk all the corridors of the Center...

go down the stairs,

and exit through this door.

And when they came out,

they had to immediately deactivate the two side cameras.

Once they had deactivated these, they had to work on the main door.

The magnet, the numerical combination, and the lock.

They took the small video camera and watched it

to see the last combination that was entered that night.

The key worked beautifully, very well,

but the third problem with the door was the magnet.

Obviously, The Genius had already studied it.

This is the magnetic alarm system

that we found on Monday morning

when we stepped into the vault room.

You see here two metal plates.

One metal plate was attached to the vault door with four screws.

The other metal plate was attached to the doorjamb.

If someone would try to open the vault door

while the alarm is still activated,

it would break the magnetic field, and the alarm would set off.

So we think they did some preparations a few days earlier, before the heist.

You can detach this magnetic plate from the vault door

by unscrewing these four screws,

and you can also detach this metal plate from the doorjamb.

Next thing is they shortened the screws

so that from the outside,

everything still looks fine,

but on the inside, the screws are not attaching the door anymore.

Now, with double-sided tape,

they can attach these two metal plates back in the original position

on the vault door and to the jamb.

On the night of the heist,

they pulled them away from the vault door.

Now the magnetic field is still intact,

the alarm is still on,

but they are able to open that vault door.

When you opened the door,

the first thing they found were two anti-theft alarms.

One, the central one, was a sensor that could detect light,

and another one could detect heat and movement.

A sort of polystyrene box was created.

It does not reflect nor let the rays in,

and it doesn't let the heat get out.

This was stressing me out.

Also because my wife was calling me.

She suspected I might have a woman, some affair...

"Why didn't you come home for Valentine's Day?"

"It was an important day to be together, and you didn't come home."

It was truly a big stress.

When... When she gets mad, she's terrifying.

They opened the vault door, they neutralized all the alarm systems,

but now they are still facing these 189 safe deposit boxes,

and each box had an individual key

and a three-digit dial.

Now, for 189 safes,

you need 189 codes and 189 keys to open them.

Initially, we didn't have a clue how those individual boxes were opened.

It was already more than two hours past midnight

when he called me and said, "We are ready to open the boxes."

"From now on, we are doing our job, and in a few hours, we are out."

Now, in Floordambos,

we saw that these metal pieces were found between the rubbish,

and we realized that some of these metal pieces

were left in the vault room.

One of us was able to combine them

into a kind of a... a homemade construction.

Looking at the ingenuity in their work...

...I could not believe this.

The whole tool looked a bit like a corkscrew...

with two metal bars

that you can place on the side of each safe deposit box.

So with the handles, you could actually turn...

...and put force on that lock,

forcing it to jump open.

In the morning, people would start to move to get to work.

We had to be out at 5:00, 5:30 a.m., no later.

And this was a problem,

because, with only one tool, he had to open all those security boxes.

Stones do not require much space.

Any other object would require space.

They threw hundreds of thousands on the floor.

I could not turn on the car, so I had to stay cold.

I was nervous, very nervous.

Eventually, after three hours, they called me and told me,

"Uh, Leo, we are finishing. We are stopping now."

"Move to the opposite side, to Pelikaanstraat."

"Wait for us at the same spot."

I loaded all the goods and equipment and headed home.

Getting home to my apartment,

the car is open, and I take one suitcase upstairs.

Then someone gets another suitcase and comes upstairs.

Once upstairs, The Monster and I,

from my apartment, go up to the roof.

The two of us went high up

to hear if there were any sirens or any agitation in the city.

We waited there for ten minutes in the cold,

to listen to the city to hear if something was wrong.

But we didn't hear anything.

We accomplished an endeavor that looked so impenetrable.

We felt really proud for doing something so strong, powerful.

Don't you feel guilty, for instance,

for people who lost their business?

I don't feel guilty due to one reason.

Everyone I robbed always earned from it.

How do you mean?

If I stole 10 kilos of gold, they reported 30 kilos.

If I stole 13, they said 25.

Do you mean that through insurance they got more?

Of course.

I mean, I'm dishonest, but in the end... ...facts are different.

Bullshit.

Sorry for my language, but that's... that's big.

It's very stupid to believe like that.

The cost of insurance is a big cost that diamond companies have to bear.

The Diamond Center was considered

the safest of all the premises you could be in.

So most prefer not to take insurance.

A hundred percent of my assets were wiped away.

A few days after the robbery,

we were allowed to go into the vault.

There was an older man, sitting on the ground, crying like a baby.

Somebody, uh, stole the work of his life.

And when a thief wipes with his hand, saying, "It's nothing,"

and minimizes the implication of his acts,

it's disgusting.

We had a small party, you know.

We drank and ate everything.

In the apartment, we glanced over the goods we had taken

and worked out that, to the naked eye,

it could have been close to 100 million.

The sole reason that they succeeded

was the successful reconnaissance done by Mr. Notarbartolo.

If you get that far,

people can feel more relaxed.

But at the same time, you might make mistakes.

The appointment was the following day,

for everyone, if everything had gone well, to meet in Italy, in Brescia,

to divide the loot

and decide who'd take care of selling the loot.

Anything we had touched,

we touched with gloves and with masks,

for fear of saliva going anywhere...

For the rubbish, it was decided that I should take the bags

as I had found a place to burn them.

And I went to take a shower,

so I didn't see what happened in that room.

Someone from the group, I don't know who it could have been,

took the garbage bag from my apartment,

from when we ate our meal,

and they throw that in the bag too.

I get out of the shower, but I don't know what was thrown inside.

I saw "My Friend," who was there ready. I told him, "You come with me of course."

"We will take out the rubbish. I know where to burn it."

We leave Antwerp and get on the highway.

All of a sudden, he says, "No, I want to take the train, go to Paris,

and from Paris I'll go to Turin."

That really disappointed me.

So at the last minute, we found a different spot from what I had decided.

You enter this country lane which ends in this groove.

Always running alongside the highway.

I noticed, in passing, that on the left there was a wooden house.

And I told him, "Wait a second, so I can check what's inside the house."

"I'll go check that the owner isn't there."

As I was going towards the house,

when I was almost, let's say, 20 meters away...

there was a kind of metallic crash.

With something metallic falling, I thought someone was there.

I can't possibly burn anything here.

When I got back,

I don't know why, but he...

Partly because the bin bags got tangled in the weeds and the wood,

and they had ripped, at that point, a lot of things had fallen,

and he scattered it there.

It was impossible to pick everything up.

I said, "Look, the owner is probably there."

"If he sees the license plate, he can report us."

"We've just thrown some garbage. Let's get out of here."

Carelessness?

Tiredness?

Call it what you want.

We got back in the car, and we left.

I left him at the station

and carried on alone.

We all had to meet the following day in Brescia.

I headed towards the border...

and I arrived in Italy at 7:00 in the morning.

We met up in an apartment in Brescia.

Starting with the pleasantries, "How are you?"

Hugs and kisses.

I said, "It's upsetting, but I have to tell you about something

that happened on the way here."

And they were all relaxed about it.

They said, "What can happen? They can't get to us from the rubbish."

And they said,

"You should go back to Antwerp to return the car,

to pay for the office,

to pay rent for the apartment."

I had to look like I had nothing to hide.

Leonardo, you have just stolen a lot of money.

Weren't you taking a bit of a risk?

I scoured the TV newscasts for my name, but I didn't find it anywhere.

I mean, that's why I had the confidence in me to say,

"Okay, I'm at ease going to Antwerp."

And so it happened. I stopped in Turin.

My wife said, "Since you're going on a round trip,

I'll take the car with you, and then we can come back together."

"I wanna go see what this apartment looks like."

My wife is obsessed with cleaning apartments.

She'll even clean your apartment if she goes there.

That's just her nature.

During that first week, we were hardly at home.

And even if you are at home,

still your mind and my brains were thinking only about this case.

When I was driving back home on my motorcycle,

I saw that I missed three phone calls.

I heard my colleague, Gerry Vanderkelen...

...saying that they received news from the Diamond Center

that Mr. Notarbartolo had returned to Antwerp.

And at that moment, he was in the Diamond Center.

And I thought, repeat this again, please.

Leonardo Notarbartolo, our main suspect,

returned to Antwerp

and was standing now, waiting in the building

that he had robbed a week before?

It's unbelievable.

"He's there. He's located in the Diamond Center."

"Get your ass here to the office."

I had to take the highway.

I didn't have too much traffic. It took me only 15 minutes to get there.

Indeed, I was excited.

So I got back on my motorcycle and back to the office.

When I got near my office,

I saw the manager at the door.

From the interrogations during that week,

the building manager realized

that one of our main suspects was Mr. Notarbartolo,

because we were constantly asking information about him.

She saw me, "Mr. Notarbartolo, Mr. Notarbartolo!"

"Have you heard what happened? There's been a theft in our vault!"

I told my colleague Gerry, like,

"Make sure that you send immediately people to arrest him."

I remember it like yesterday.

I was a driver, and believe me, I drove like hell.

So we arrived just in front of the Diamond Center,

and, uh, we immediately run into the building.

When I saw her delaying, I realized the police were on the way.

In the hallway, we saw the building manager

together with Mr. Notarbartolo.

I had no way out anymore, at that point.

By then, you surrender. Let's face the situation.

I spoke to him. I said, "Mr. Notarbartolo."

"Good evening, sir."

"My name is Gerry Vanderkelen, and I'm going to arrest you."

We handcuffed him, and I think he never asked any questions.

Nothing at all.

One week after the heist,

we actually have our main suspect arrested and sitting in our car.

That was a wonderful feeling.

I asked him, like, "Okay, Gerry, but we don't know his hideout,

so try to find out where he is staying."

They tried as good as they could.

"Okay, point out which direction we have to drive to go to your house."

And I tried to beat around the bush.

I tried not to tell them that. Right?

And all these following minutes,

they were circling around the diamond district,

but no house was found.

He said a few times, "It's too dark. I always go by foot."

"I don't remember the full address."

"Not sure about the house number."

My colleagues did not stop asking the question.

"Is it this street? Is it this street?"

"Take your time. Take your time and find his house."

He then suddenly decided that he remembered where he was staying.

In an apartment, Charlottalei number 33.

We parked our car almost in front of the building.

And he says, "I'm staying at the seventh floor."

And both colleagues are looking at the seventh floor,

and at the same time as they are looking,

they see that the lights on the seventh floor go out.

The door opens,

and three people step out of the apartment,

the wife of Mr. Notarbartolo and the two other friends.

One man is carrying a carpet on his shoulder.

Yeah, a carpet. Yeah.

Like in the movies. A carpet.

-On their shoulder? -On their shoulder. A carpet.

First of all, they ask,

"Sir, what are you planning to do with this carpet?"

And the first reaction of this guy is like, "Which carpet?"

At that moment, I saw some change in Mr. Notarbartolo's...

in his face.

I think he must realize at a certain moment,

"Shit, what have I done?"

My wife?

Well, this...

pains me.

She's never, ever abandoned me. She's never left me alone.

Wait a moment.

It's all right.

No, when I talk about these things, I have a hard time, unfortunately.

The police officers took the people in custody,

and the laboratory was asked to go to Charlottalei,

where the apartment was,

to have a thorough investigation.

There was food in the fridge,

there were chairs around the table, there was a bottle of grappa, there were...

...toothbrushes, uh, razor blades, tissues.

Also there's a small leather bag, some kind of toilet bag,

and on the side, they made a hole.

And this hole, actually, was perfect to fit a video camera in.

We also found a receipt from a local supermarket in Antwerp,

Delhaize.

On that receipt, we saw different food items,

like wine, pasta, cheese, and salami,

and pieces of that food we found back in Floordambos.

So as soon as we had Mr. Notarbartolo into custody,

we could easily get his DNA.

And then we saw that his DNA matched with the DNA

found on the half-eaten salami sandwich in the Floordambos.

But second of all, the receipt mentioned the date, 13 February,

two days before the heist, around 1:00 p.m. in the afternoon.

So we went to the supermarket

to see whether we could find any footage still.

And on the footage, we saw a... a guy

that was actually approaching the checkout at the supermarket

to pay for all the items.

Very tall guy, sportive, short hair.

And we were able to identify this man as Ferdinando Finotto.

The most important evidence that we found was two SIM card holders.

One of them mentioned "mio," and the other mentioned "non-mio."

As far as my Italian goes, it means like "mine" and "not mine."

The SIM card holder had a serial number.

From the serial number,

you can, first of all, identify the SIM card,

in which telephone the SIM card was put,

and you can actually follow the movements of the SIM card.

First important result was that...

...the weekend of the actual robbery,

these SIM cards, we can place under the cell tower

of Charlottalei number 33, from where they start.

Then, during the night,

from Saturday and Sunday,

under the cell tower of Diamond Center.

After 6:00 a.m.,

we see these cards again activated in Charlottalei 33.

Afterwards, our targets left from the apartment

and drove straight to a place in Italy called Brescia,

coming together under the same cell tower over there.

Maybe they are specialists on alarm systems,

but they were certainly not aware of what the possibilities are to follow a phone.

The carpet, which was retrieved downstairs,

was back put into the apartment,

and from the moment we unrolled it, it all began to, uh... to sparkle.

The nice thing is that in the trash of Floordambos,

we have found small green emeralds,

and in the carpet, there were also small green emeralds.

So we decided to have the stones examined by an expert,

who came to the conclusion

these were all stones from the same shipment, let's say.

So these stones belonged to each other.

Based on these green emeralds,

we could link the apartment with Floordambos.

And automatically then, actually, you can link it with the vault room.

So we had this triangle now of these three crime scenes

that were linked with each other.

Based on the telephone records and on the DNA profiles,

we were able to identify four people

as 100% sure that they were involved in this crime.

Four suspects were arrested for the diamond heist in Antwerp.

Ferdinando Finotto.

Elio D'Onorio.

And from the telephone records,

we could finally identify a third person, Mr. Pietro Tavano,

an old friend of Mr. Notarbartolo,

and also a member of The School of Turin.

The fourth person was Mr. Notarbartolo.

Now, based on all the evidence that we had,

it was clear that he was not only present during this heist,

but that he also was the mastermind of this whole operation.

Leonardo Notarbartolo, jeweler from Turin,

arrived in Antwerp in November 2000.

He immediately rented an office at the Diamond Center,

the building where the robbery took place.

Leonardo, was the only reason you came to Antwerp

in 2000

because you were in fact the mastermind of this heist?

No.

I mean, I got nothing.

I never got a penny from anyone.

The mastermind is Alessandro.

To be honest, I've always thought of him as a ghost.

I mean, he appeared and he disappeared, like... I don't know what.

The whole story about Alessandro... I mean, yeah, no, sorry.

If there was any Alessandro in the diamond area,

we would have found him.

He said his name was Alessandro.

It probably wasn't his real name.

We analyzed more than 200,000 telephone contacts.

We have DNA profiles.

We interrogated so many people.

He said, "I know exactly who you are."

We found trash and paper in Floordambos,

in the diamond vault.

We did house searches on his apartment, in his office.

The name Alessandro, I have never heard of. Never.

It is a fiction.

Meeting in a warehouse?

Spy pens?

Replica vaults?

This isn't the story of a crime.

It's more like the script of a movie.

There was no super criminal lurking in the background.

It was just him.

Mr. Notarbartolo is a smart person.

He knows the diamond world.

Did you know there was a vault

inside the Diamond Center?

Yes, sure. I knew it.

And from our investigation,

we only can conclude

that Mr. Notarbartolo was the head of a criminal organization.

A bunch of guys from The School of Turin,

especially assigned to do a particular job.

The Italian Leonardo Notarbartolo

was far from impressed this morning.

The judge gave him the expected ten years for the diamond heist.

Three other gang members were jailed for five years.

According to the judges, Notarbartolo was one of the gang's leaders.

Take 16.

Back in... in 2015,

you yourself were arrested and ultimately convicted

because hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of diamonds were found in your home.

What do you have to...

It is, um, it is correct that I was, uh, in 2015,

that I was hiding, uh, diamonds in my house.

Um, I was not laundering anything. I never sold any diamonds.

I never, uh, bought any diamond or whatever.

I made a mistake.

Um, I had reasons... I had my reasons to... to do this.

Um, but one thing is for sure.

Whatever happened in 2015,

has nothing to do with the investigation of, uh, of the diamond heist in 2003.

That's 12 years later.

The fact that I lost my job

and that I cannot perform anymore as a police officer,

it almost destroyed me personally.

I mean... it's clear that in your career,

that you will face, uh, difficulties,

and that there are, uh, yeah...

...moments that you have to be, uh, strong and smarter.

But, again, I faced the consequences.

I lost my job, and that, um, that was... that's a pity.

Everyone deserves a second chance.

That's what I...

That's what I constantly hear.

But to get that second chance,

it's not so easy.

No diamonds or money was recovered.

At the very end, we came up with the 100 million US dollars.

But again, if you ask me today, honestly,

I'm absolutely sure

that the amount is much higher than 100 million US dollars.

Think he's got the money? You think he's got his cut?

Probably he got the most of all of them.

He's not driving around Turin now in a Ferrari, that's for sure.

And that is... that is very smart of him.

But we know him as a smart guy.