Flawless: Inside the Largest Diamond Heist in History by Scott Andrew Selby Page A

the Carlton Hotel heist. In that case, flamboyant Italian criminal Valerio Viccei—who like Notarbartolo had a weakness for fast cars and flashy clothes—had led a group of accomplices into the Knightsbridge Safe Deposit Centre in London and held up the staff at gunpoint. They flipped the sign on the front door to read “closed,” emptied the safe deposit boxes of an estimated $65 million in cash and gems, and then just walked away. The police found one of Viccei’s fingerprints in the Safe Deposit Centre and arrested him and everyone involved a month later. Viccei was convicted and sentenced to twenty-two years.
    The Turin gang undoubtedly knew of Viccei—he was Italian, after all—but they probably considered themselves more closely aligned with Albert Spaggiari, known for spending Bastille Day weekend in 1976 pillaging four hundred safe deposit boxes inside the Société Générale bank in Nice. Spaggiari, a Frenchman, was a legend to sophisticated criminals everywhere.
    After renting a safe deposit box at the bank, Spaggiari and a team of trusted accomplices had spent two months burrowing a tunnel from the city sewer system into the vault. The sewer was big enough to drive a Land Rover inside; the thieves filled the truck with excavated dirt that was then dumped miles away.
    Before committing to this arduous task, Spaggiari had put a loud alarm clock in his safe and timed it to go off in the middle of the night. He wanted to see if the vault was protected with acoustic or seismic alarms that would detect the noise and vibration of their work. It turned out that the vault had no alarms at all because the bank owners considered it to be utterly impregnable.
    Once Spaggiari’s men tunneled up into the vault, they welded the vault door shut from the inside and held a looting party, complete with wine and pâté, as they raided the safe deposit boxes. In some of the boxes of prominent citizens, they discovered compromising photos. As an extra touch, the thieves taped the photos to the wall for all to see, and then escaped with $18 million worth of cash, jewels, and precious metal. They left behind a note with a sentiment that the School of Turin would have admired. Sans armes, sans haine, et sans violence, it read. “Without guns, without hatred, and without violence.”
    The police eventually caught Spaggiari, but even that part of the tale was stamped with his special flair: he escaped from custody during a hearing by jumping out a third-story courthouse window and taking off on a motorcycle. Legend has it that he mailed a check for the equivalent of six hundred dollars to the owner of the car he damaged when he landed on it. He was never recaptured and was rumored to have died in Italy’s Piedmont, where the School of Turin planned the ultimate heist two and a half decades later. Certainly, it was one Spaggiari would have admired.
    Even if they didn’t consider a holdup as being beneath them, there were practical reasons the School of Turin rejected the direct approach of an armed robbery. Storming the building was simply out of the question. Notarbartolo didn’t need to be operational in Antwerp long before taking stock of the overwhelming arsenal at the hands of the Belgian police and the private security guards who roamed the district’s streets. Some carried Belgian-made FN P90 submachine guns and wore body armor.
    Between his apartment and the Diamond District, Notarbartolo walked past a full-service police station every day, counting as many as a dozen cop cars out front at times. At most, it would take four or five minutes before as many as fifty heavily armed cops dropped into the Diamond District like paratroopers. The vehicle barricades meant raiders would have to arrive and depart on foot. Without question, there would be a bloody shootout with very little hope of leaving with anything of value; it would simply take too long to get down to the vault and open enough safe deposit boxes to make it