The story of the diamond heist is going to blow your mind. Its details and planning are far beyond the fictional robberies in movies. The plan was hatched by Leonardo Notarbartolo and his efficient crew.
Location of Diamond heist
The Antwerp diamond center district is located in downtown Antwerp in Belgium. It is also known as the diamond quarter. 80 percent of diamonds in the world pass through it to be polished and incorporated into jewelry to be sold.
This is why the center consists of maximum security. It has its own dedicated police provided by the Belgium government with the most artificial cameras, which provide 24 /7 video surveillance. The entire environment is surrounded by steel cylinders that could block any vehicle attempting to escape.
Inside this district, there are diamond traders from all over the world, who rent offices and stores, as well as safe deposit boxes to store their precious goods such as diamonds and foreign currencies, which are secured inside the building’s vault.
This very interesting vault is situated two floors below the main floor and has a lock with 100 million possible combinations. With an external security camera next to a light sensor, and a magnetic field that would trigger an alarm if the vault door was opened.
However, to grant entry, the door still needs a foot-long key. And although there are no guards around the vault, any suspicious movement would trigger the security force and they would readily descend with automatic weapons.
When was the Diamond heist carried out
Well, in the year 2003, this fortified vault was successfully robbed by an Italian man named Leonardo Notarbartolo and his crew which consisted of 4 members.
We’ll get into details in a bit, but in the meantime, it is worth mentioning that probably without a man who approached Leo while sipping from his Espresso in the Antwerp district, there would be no robbery.
The jewelry dealer offered Leo 100,000Euros if he could provide an answer to whether the vault in the Antwerp Diamond center could be robbed? The answer, without a doubt, was no.
Still, Leonardo decided to demonstrate to the dealer how impossible it was to get into the center, let alone get inside the vault. Leonardo had already been occupying an office in the center for three years.
He had a 24-hour access card that allowed him to get inside the vault, and during his years there, he made himself visible and gained a reputation.
Consequently, the fact of having access to the building made the idea doable, so Leo made up his mind to give this operation a shot. But you might be wondering why among all the people in the center, the dealer chose Leonardo.
What you don’t know is that Leonardo has had his fair share of theft. Ever since he was a teenager, he stole several things from several people, and by his late 40s, he had already become a professional thief.
So, the first task that Leo was assigned to do was get footage in the building as well as the vault using a tiny pen with a high digital camera, placed in his chest pocket. And within a few days, the dealer contacted Leo with the meeting place and time.
On his arrival at an abandoned warehouse, Leonardo was surprised by a replica of the vault, which was made based on the footage from the tiny pen. Inside the vault, there were three Italian men conversing, each one of them with a specific nickname. So as no one of them would identify the other in case of being caught.
These men were very skillful and professional. The genius is an expert in disabling any kind of alarm system. An electrician and mechanic. The king of keys- an expert in counterfeiting keys.
His job was to duplicate the vault’s foot-long key, using footage that was taken by another hidden camera that Leo was able to install behind a glaring light above the vault door.
The camera captured the key as well as the combination of the lock and broadcast them to a hidden sensor inside a fire extinguisher nearby the storage room. Finally, a friend of Leonardo, and though the team was not very comfortable with him being a member, Leo vouched for him.
Read: History of the Kohinoor Diamond
The final preparatory step before the heist was for Leonardo to enter the vault one more time and cover the interior heat and motion sensor with a transparent, oily mist using women’s hairspray. As the oily film would block the sensor’s ability to detect any changes in the room’s temperature, the only problem was that they didn’t know for how long the spray would last.
Other than this everything went smoothly, and Leonardo executed the mission easily even though the place was literally filled with security cameras. The team had practiced and mastered their heist process, memorizing each and every step by heart.
Indeed, on the night of February 15th, 2003, Leo rented a car and dropped the Monster, the Genius, the King of Keys, and Speedy into a garden in the back of the diamond center, which happened to be among the few places that didn’t have constant video surveillance cameras in the area.
Using a ladder that was hidden in the garden previously, the genius climbed up into a small balcony, which had a heat sensor. On the second floor of the center, he managed to place a large homemade polyester shield so as to disable the alarm and help the rest of the team to join through a wide-open window.
The team has succeeded in entering the diamond center without raising any suspicion. All of the team wore plastic gloves to avoid leaving fingerprints, and on their way to the vault, they covered all security cameras using black plastic bags in order to turn the lights on without triggering the alarm.
The team effortlessly continued their way until they reached the vault. Where the real work began. The very first thing that they encountered was a magnetic lock on the door that consisted of two plates, if these magnetic plates break, they would trigger a magnetic field which also reports and sets the alarm.
Nonetheless, the genius was able to overcome this security measure, by using a custom-made aluminum plate and sticking it on the two magnetic plates, then unscrewing them. Moving on to the following step, which was the specialty of the king of keys, as he was about to use the duplicate key, he froze for a moment as an idea struck his mind.
He noticed that the guards always visit the utility room before opening the vault door. Thus, he decided to take the risk and take a look into the room. Surprisingly, he found the original key, then he made up his mind to use the original one instead of the duplicated one, in order to ensure the accuracy and manufacture of the vault.
Now they are about the final step, to open the door they have to enter the combination numbers, but before that, they had to turn the lights off so that the light detector could not be triggered. As you remember, Leonardo hid a tiny camera behind the glaring light of a lamp.
So the team was already familiar with the combination through the video, they entered the combination and the vault’s door opened. Now the role of the Monster, an electromechanical, was about to begin.
He already practiced in the replica vault and memorized the number of steps, therefore, the monster was able to reach for the ceiling in the dark so as to rewrap the wires in order not to send any alarms out. The team continued their job in the darkness.
They blinded the heat sensors with styrofoam because the women’s spray hair that Notarbartolo had spread on before wouldn’t last long.
Simultaneously, they put a tape on the light sensors and another black tape on the interior security camera, and while they were working on these steps, Speedy was backed up to the stairs to notify Notarbartolo through the cell phone that the vault’s door opened safely and they were in.
Meanwhile, Leonardo was sitting outside in the car watching the front diamond center. The king of keys assisted in opening the deposit boxes using a hand crank drill and then they rushed into emptying the boxes into the bags in complete darkness. The bags were full of jewelry, diamonds, and foreign currencies.
At 5:30 am they finished the biggest diamond heist in history and they headed to the car, in which they put the bags letting Leo drive to the apartment while the men headed on foot. The gang gathered at Leonardo’s apartment to check the bags expecting 100 million dollars of loot, but they were shocked when they discovered that most of the bags were empty.
The loot they robbed was only about 20 million dollars. Immediately Leonardo thought that the jewelry Dealer had set them up, and maybe he had planned this with other dealers who were operating together, and they pulled their inventory out of the vault before the heist in order to claim their diamonds, jewelry, and money.
As for the team, the profit was about 20 million dollars to split. Monday 17th February, a concierge named Jorge Dia De Suisa was shocked when he discovered that the vault was robbed and all the safety deposit boxes were opened and millions of dollars of goods were on the floor.
Under the lights, with the disappearance of 100 million dollars of jewelry with no evidence left behind and no one could understand how it was successfully done.
How diamond heist culprits were caught
Two days after the Diamond heist each one of the team separated in different ways, and while Leonardo and his friend Speedy were on the highway to Italy carrying black plastic full of the heist evidence, Speedy was in a panic. He insisted on Leonardo pull off into the forest.
Then speedy somehow because of his panic attack instead of burning the evidence, he hurled them into the mud while Leonardo was busy burning his own. When Leonardo found out what Speedy had done, he ordered him to go back to the car, and he thought that no one would find the rubbish, so he left too.
But unluckily after a few weeks, a man who owned the land complained to the police that he found the rubbish and thought it was left by some teenagers whom he had troubles with. However, the police paid him no attention.
But when he called again he mentioned that the rubbish consisted of the Antwerp Diamond Center envelopes, which the police found so suspicious that they hurried up to the scene. Where, indeed, they found plenty of evidence of the diamond heist including a salami sandwich which later on would reveal Leonardo’s DNA.
Leonardo was arrested after being connected to the crime by DNA evidence and sentenced to 10 years in prison because he was found guilty of orchestrating the diamond heist and refused to specify the team involved in the Diamond heist and only provided the court with aliases.
But he was released from parole in 2009 and he is a free man now. So, do you admire the story of the biggest diamond heist in history or do you believe that Leonardo only faked the part of the jewelry dealer? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.