4 held in 'incredible' diamond heist

ANTWERP, Belgium — The thieves stood ankle-deep in a mess of diamonds, gold, jewelry, stocks, bonds, cash and lockboxes strewn on the vault room floor.

After outwitting security in the world's diamond-cutting capital and prying open 123 vaults, they had one unexpected problem: There was just too much loot to carry.

Two weeks later, authorities are still trying to figure out how much the thieves actually did get away with. Their rough estimate is $100 million. That would easily make the Antwerp heist the largest safe-deposit-box robbery ever.

So far, authorities have three Italians and a Dutchwoman behind bars, but no clue where the loot is. The suspected mastermind, 51-year-old Leonardo Notarbartolo, and his wife, Adriana Crudo, 48, appeared before a magistrate yesterday and denied any connection to the robbery.

More than half the world's diamonds are traded in Antwerp's gem district, a maze of tiny streets hugging the main train station. Its turnover of $23 billion a year makes it one of the densest concentrations of valuables on Earth.

Huge deals are sealed with a handshake. "The biggest part of the diamond trade is done without a single piece of paper. It is all based on trust," said Antwerp magistrate Leen Nuyts.

That trust, however, is reinforced by security — briefcases handcuffed to wrists, cameras filming the milling crowds from many angles, and a special police station and circles of steel pillars at both ends of the district.

Investigators allege that the thieves beat the security simply by blending in.

Antwerp's director of judicial services, Eric Sack, said Notarbartolo, an Italian, rented an office in the Diamond Center in November 2000 under the name of a phantom company and slowly became part of the scenery. It did not matter that he had a criminal record in Italy. "He was not known here," Nuyts said.

Having an office in the building provided an intimate glimpse of how the dealers operate.

"Out of habit and security, people went down to the cellar in the evening, and certainly for the weekend, to deposit their valuables there," diamond dealer Marcel Fuehrer said.

The vaults are two stories underground. Visitors pass cameras, bars and a 12-inch-thick reinforced door to get to the individual vaults.

Yet, the thieves' plan was "a piece of genius in its simplicity," said Sack.

According to police, the thieves took their time to study the alarm systems and somehow obtained copies of the master keys to the vaults. Then came the weekend of Feb. 15-16, when the diamond district goes eerily quiet and the guards at the Diamond Center are reduced to a single person. Sack, the judicial-services chief, believes Italian legmen were brought in to do the actual theft. They taped over the cameras and took compromising videotapes out of the surveillance system.

They had enough time to break open vault after vault, grabbing so much loot that they left a lot behind.

"When I entered the vault and saw everything strewn around, it was just incredible," Fuehrer said. "It was like a hallucination."

In fact, after all the careful planning, the thieves were undone, authorities claim, because of a sloppy cleanup.

They threw bags with compromising material into a ditch alongside the highway and by chance, police recovered them almost immediately. The bags reportedly included letters referring to the Diamond Center, break-in equipment and copied pass keys.

The discovery pointed to Notarbartolo, Nuyts said. When he showed up at the Diamond Center with his boyhood friend, Antonio Faletti, a guard alerted police and Notarbartolo was arrested.

Faletti ran away but police caught up with him at Notarbartolo's apartment, said Nuyts. Their wives were inside and were also arrested.