On the morning of February 17, 2003, Belgian detective Patrick Peys stood in a small room surrounded by millions of dollars’ worth of diamonds, gold, gems, and other precious items and scratched his head. It was the Monday after Valentine’s Day, but Peys wasn’t in a jewelry store deciding on a belated gift for someone special. Instead, he was two floors underground, inside one of the most secure vaults in the world, staring at the remnants of a massive heist in the heart of Antwerp’s diamond district.
Over the weekend, a group of Italians from the School of Turin—a name coined by a newspaper reporter in the late 1990s for an unstructured group of extremely skilled jewel thieves—had penetrated the highly guarded vault and escaped undetected with an estimated $300 million in diamonds. As the city celebrated romance and played host to an international tennis tournament, the highly skilled unit, led by a man named Leonardo Notarbartolo, had evaded 24-hour police patrols, rolling metal barriers, and closed-circuit television cameras monitoring every door, hallway, and elevator. They’d slipped past motion, heat, light, and seismic detectors. They’d cracked the double lock of a foot-thick, magnetically triggered, Dutch-built door. And then they’d emptied out dozens of safety-deposit boxes, all without setting off a single alarm.
How? It seemed unthinkable. Each year, about $50 billion in diamonds passes through this three-square block in Antwerp, accounting for about 85 percent of the world’s diamond trade—and that’s not even counting the undocumented handshake deals that take place within this vicinity. But the excessive levels of security had always been enough to keep anyone from even considering a heist. Peys and his partner, Agim De Bruycker, both of whom had been specially hired as Diamond Squad officers, quickly realized that they were staring down the barrel of a perfect crime. “There’s so many layers of security, so many things that people would have thought made it impossible,” says Scott Andrew Selby, coauthor, with Greg Campbell, of Flawless: Inside the Largest Diamond Heist in History. “With a group like the School of Turin, it’s an investment of time, money, resources—and they come up with very creative solutions.”
More than two decades later, the so-called heist of the century has gotten the Hollywood treatment. Or, at least, some of it has. Written and directed by Christian Gudegast, Den of Thieves 2: Pantera is a testosterone-fueled, modernized reimagination of that fateful February weekend, a mishmash of real and fictional events, Mafia groups, task forces, and locations. This time, Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department detective “Big Nick” O’Brien (Gerard Butler) and criminal mastermind Donnie Wilson (O’Shea Jackson Jr.) have partnered up, joining an elite squad that (like the Turin thieves) aims to rob the World Diamond Center. Though the juiced-up sequel has its action flick staples—bro fights, double crosses, and high-speed chases—it remains indebted to the real thieves’ “exactitude, the meticulousness, … the years of planning,” Gudegast says. “It's like a highlight reel of the various techniques and methods they used.”
The true story might not boast shoot-outs, SWAT team maneuvers, or even surprise steak dinners, but it was a master class in planning and precision. Until, however, the thieves made their escape: Notarbartolo and his crew thought that they had ridden off into the sunset. In reality, their seemingly airtight heist couldn’t account for the most random of forces, a stranger-than-fiction circumstance that foiled their clean getaway.
To pull off the heist of the century, Notarbartolo needed time. Lots of it. In the fall of 2000, the affable 48-year-old Italian moved into a small Antwerp apartment near the World Diamond Centre and posed as a diamond merchant who was interested in renting one of the center’s offices to source jewels for his legitimate Turin-based retail stores and Valenza design business. It didn’t take long for the building manager to approve his application. Notarbartolo was handsome, had a warm gaze, and supplied all the right documents to avert any suspicion. He was the inside man for a reason.
Had the manager done a more thorough background and business check, she would have found Notarbartolo’s long rap sheet as a notorious thief in his home country. Instead, she gave him a tour of the building, showed him his office, then took him two levels underground—to a foyer that led to the vault, which contained a safe room where he was granted a key to his own safety-deposit box. All the while, Notarbartolo had started taking mental notes on every anti-theft measure in and outside the building. According to John Gotti’s hit man Richard “The Iceman” Kuklinski, security was “tight as a nun’s ass,” but with his badge and keys, Notarbartolo had nearly full access to the place.
“There’s certain qualities the inside man needs,” Selby says. “They need to quickly, on the spot, be able to spin a tale that makes sense of anything. They need to have a certain confidence. They need to be everybody’s friend, but also quickly forgettable.”
Notarbartolo had all of that in abundance, but he was only one piece of the puzzle. The Italian had been working with other members from the School of Turin, known best for looting their city’s jewelry stores and frequently evading the police. This wasn’t exactly organized crime. As Selby and Campbell write, “There was no structure, no hierarchy, and no real leadership. Instead, it was a loose affiliation of men who shared some common traits: They were smart, patient, and greedy. They each had specialized skills that complemented the others.”
They also had a key distinction. Unlike the Pink Panthers, or the Panther Mafia, whom Den of Thieves 2 depicts as responsible for the thieving (according to Gudegast, the movie’s subtitle derives from Task Force Pantera, the multinational team meant to stop the gang), the School of Turin operated under a strict code of nonviolence. There was no shock and awe when it came to their thieving. “Their ideal heist is: You go down on a Monday morning and discover that the vault has been robbed,” Selby says. “Not only is there not any violence, but there’s no potential for violence because nobody interacts with them.”
Notarbartolo’s associates for this specific burglary included a handful of schemers and specialists. There was his close friend Pietro Tavano; Elio D’Onorio, an alarm system expert with a handful of front companies; and Ferdinando Finotto, a hulking “master crook” who had initially conceived of robbing Antwerp and pegged Notarbartolo as the group’s primary scout. It’s plausible that they also leaned on others, including Aniello Fontanella, an expert lock picker who owned a locksmith store, and Giovanni Poliseri, another alarm system hacker. “These are people who have legitimate businesses in northern Italy that they use to gain skills and knowledge—and they are operating these generally aboveboard,” Selby says. “[D’Onorio] has an alarm business, [but] he’s not robbing any of his customers; he’s learning everything there is to know about alarms, as well as having cover if he’s ever caught messing around with alarms.”
The group faced a daunting task. Every inch of the three-block radius around the district was under video surveillance that fed back to tapes in a security room. No vehicles had access near the buildings. On floor -2, a steel-gated door weighing three tons and monitored by a video camera protected the vault, which gave access to a 27-by-28-foot safe room with 189 individual deposit boxes that each had their own key and three-digit combination. The vault itself had 10 layers of security—it could be opened only with a long key and the right four-number code, which had 100 million possible combinations. Able to withstand 12 hours of drilling, the vault door had an embedded seismic alarm that would buzz if vibrated and also carried plates connected by a magnetic field that, if broken, would trigger an alarm at an off-site security company. To make things harder, a motion detector, heat detector (which used Doppler microwave radar), and light detector were embedded in the safe room. Not to mention the two rotating concierges who split round-the-clock patrol and assistant duties and lived in private apartments in the office tower.
For a little more than two years, Notarbartolo did his best reconnaissance. He pretended to conduct legitimate business deals with buyers and sellers to keep visiting the vault, where he could unlock and examine his deposit box, record the vault floor measurements, and take discreet photos and videos. To avoid suspicion, he spaced out his visits. Then he’d take his findings back to Italy, where his associates would unpack each round of information he’d collected before requesting more specifics and details. They needed to know the makes and models, the potential traps, the loose ends. Everything had to be precise. “They were the longest of long games,” Selby says. “With a group like the School of Turin, it’s an investment of time, money, resources—and there may not be a certain payoff.”
The primary key to igniting the whole operation? The entrance point. While all the main doors were surrounded by cameras, police, and vehicle barriers, one door, accessible through a side garage that Notarbartolo knew he could open, provided access to the building—the only door that didn’t require a badge to enter. All they had to do was fabricate a key for the door’s basic lock. Eventually, the crew discovered similar small tricks, DIY ways to disable and work around the security measures. Once they’d mapped out their sequence and collected their gear, they huddled together in Notarbartolo’s apartment. They were ready.
Around midnight on Saturday, February 15, the crew initiated its long-gestating plan. That specific weekend made logistical sense: Antwerp was hosting the annual Proximus Diamond Games, a tennis tournament featuring Venus Williams at the height of her stardom, along with the Valentine’s Day wedding of Peter Meeus, the Diamond High Council’s director general. The School of Turin believed that the combination would keep the police busy and the diamond district clear.
Detectives believe that, after the team got the all clear from a lookout, Notarbartolo, Finotto, and D’Onorio hopped into a car with all the necessary equipment. Tavano then drove the darkly dressed trio for three minutes, past a quiet police hub and up to the exterior garage door, which Notarbartolo quickly opened. As Tavano pulled away to park back near the apartment, the remaining thieves infiltrated the garage, used their fabricated key to unlock the interior building entrance, and slipped past cameras that would have alerted security had the guard booth been manned and the monitors turned on. “On the weekend, all you have is two concierges who live in the building,” Selby says. “When it’s closed on the weekends, nobody’s watching it live.”
Without missing a beat, the group took the stairwell down to the vault’s foyer. In the dark, they shrouded the security camera by taping a plastic bag and some fabric over the lens. Once they turned on the lights, they opened up their bags and took out their gear. Earlier in the week, D’Onorio had likely used Notarbartolo's badge to enter the building, stay late, and sneak down to the foyer, where he determined a way to disarm the magnetic field on the vault door using heavy-duty double-sided tape. On the night of the heist, he placed a magnetic plate over the two magnets so that he could pull them off the tape, keeping the alarm intact. Once that was complete, they had to unlock the vault door. It’s not entirely clear how the group figured out the four-digit combination. While some theories point to a hidden camera in the ceiling angled at the lock, it’s more probable that the code was lifted from a concierge who had written it down, or that Notarbartolo knew that the code hadn’t been scrambled after the vault had last been opened. After lining up the numbers, the group took a crowbar to break into an adjacent storage room to acquire the long key (Notarbartolo had studied its location), which took off the dead bolts and finally granted them access to the safe room.
At long last, they’d made it inside. Next, they had to disable the remaining detectors. With the lights killed again, Finnoto most likely masked the light sensors. After covering the motion and heat detector with an aerosol spray, one of the men fastened styrofoam (which refracted the infrared beams) to the end of a mop handle, held it in front of himself, walked toward the sensor in slow motion, and covered the microwave radar device. Finally, they got to work. With a bit of force, they used a corkscrew-style tool and began popping open deposit boxes. The loot—rough and polished diamonds, gold bars, bracelets and necklaces, various currency—quickly littered the floor. As Selby and Campbell note: “The vault looked like a bomb had gone off with shrapnel made of gems and gold.”
It took several hours, but they eventually raided 109 safety-deposit boxes. Around dawn, Tavano pulled the car back to the drop-off spot, and the thieves, carrying a treasure chest’s worth of jewels—one bag weighed at least 44 pounds—followed their path back to the garage, while one of them diverted to the security control room to replace the CCTV footage (from that night and earlier in the week) with clean tapes. Once they’d all climbed into the car, they took off back to the apartment to celebrate.
Throughout the morning, they hurriedly sorted through their goody bags, dividing everything out for a trip back to Italy. As they loaded the cars, they also packed four black bags with tools and equipment from the heist and some kitchen trash. “You're in this apartment, you’re sorting things out, and you're like, ‘OK these jewels are worth keeping, this thing’s crap, here’s a bunch of paperwork we don’t need, here’s stuff we need,’” Selby says. “You’re basically sorting things into two piles. The valuables that somebody’s gonna transport back to Italy and the trash that we should get rid of.”
Soon, they went their separate ways. They had won. They just had to take out the trash.
The next morning, Peys and De Bruycker waded through pandemonium in the diamond district. Throughout the streets, those with valuables inside the vault were hysterical, panicking and crying. As the detectives walked around the vault, they accidentally stepped on $30,000 bracelets and ancestral relics that were worth more than gold bars. Because there wasn’t any noticeable evidence and the off-site security team reported nothing abnormal about the alarm, they were stumped. They also didn’t know how to get the remaining jewels on the ground back to their rightful owners.
“It looked a bit like it was our 9/11,” Peys recounted on the Heist Audible podcast. “We didn’t immediately have a clue where to start.”
Later that day, however, Peys got a call from a local police station with a promising lead. That morning, Antwerp resident August Van Camp couldn’t remember whether he’d locked a metal gate on a service road leading to Floordambos forest the night before. He considered himself a guardian for the forest space and often patrolled the area, looking for litter and trespassers on the land. As he drove over to the gate site and parked his car on a path by the nearby highway, he noticed some debris on the ground. As he approached it, he saw several garbage bags splayed open around a thicket of small trees. Van Camp was angry. He began going through the clutter, hoping to find something to implicate whoever had littered so brazenly. The bags were full of documents from the diamond district, torn-up papers, and half-eaten sandwiches. They were also full of receipts.
When Van Camp returned home, he ranted about what he’d found to his wife, who had been watching the news about the heist all morning. Van Camp called the police, and soon the thicket of garbage bags was surrounded by investigators combing every paper for answers. “Anywhere else in the forest and it just would have rotted away, or by the time anybody found it, maybe it would have been too late,” Selby says. “But just by chance, it happened to be monitored by a very eccentric man.”
Over the following weeks, Peys and his team started to put things together. Investigators followed up with a hardware store and grocery store based on receipts they’d found in the trash. They found a ripped-up business card for D’Onorio, which set off alarm bells in Peys’s head since he already knew that Notarbartolo, also an Italian, hadn’t suffered any losses in the heist. It took awhile to sort out enough hard evidence and DNA to implicate the Turin thieves. Belgian law enforcement located and interrogated Notarbartolo—he had to return to his Antwerp office to keep from looking suspiciously absent—and then worked with Italian police to track down the rest of his associates, searching their homes and bringing them in for questioning. After a monthlong investigation, Belgian authorities charged Notarbartolo, Finotto, D’Onorio, and Tavano with robbing the Diamond Centre.
After a couple of years of court appearances and extradition obstacles, all four were eventually convicted and sent to prison. Notarbartolo was sentenced to 10 years, while D’Onorio, Tavano, and Finotto received five-year sentences. But the stolen loot was never found. It’s possible that a majority of the haul had been exchanged for cash through a fence or financier, but Selby and Campbell believe that the most likely scenario is that the stolen goods were disposed of separately, perhaps laundered through the School of Turin’s businesses, while others were melted or sold to other fences. “Unfortunately, we know that stolen diamonds can be sold,” Peys says in Flawless. “If you get it for a cheap price, and you are sure that they can’t be identified, you get profit. And as always, there will be people in the diamond business that want to make an easy profit.”
Selby knows this to be true. “You can have a diamond change hands four times in a week. ... You have hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of diamonds that are just back out in the world, you know?” he says. “One of your readers might have it in their jewelry room.”
More on ‘Den of Thieves’
Gudegast had always envisioned a Den of Thieves sequel. Throughout his initial research, he’d uncovered and collected clippings on all kinds of heists around the world, figuring that he could build a whole franchise. Even before the first movie, “I knew that I wanted to go to Europe and explore the world of diamond heists,” he says. Specifically, he wanted to go to Antwerp. He’d been mesmerized by the Diamond Centre heist—the amount stolen, the layers of breached security, the time investment. He wanted a closer look.
In 2019, he traveled to Belgium and began a deep dive. He started by meeting with Peys and De Bruycker, the latter of whom had 20 years of experience investigating diamond heists by then. “They really opened up the whole world to me,” Gudegast says, “and really got into all the details as to how things were done.” Then he went to the Balkans, where his technical adviser Slavko Ilic had set up meetings with some of the actual thieves. Gudegast got to “know them as human beings,” he says. He met them numerous times, asked loads of questions, and began forming friendships. “You understand them better, their motivations, and why they do what they do.”
Eventually, Gudegast brought both investigators and the criminals, whose names he hasn’t disclosed, into the fold as full-time consultants. He kept adding to his notes files, photographed actual locations, put together look books, and started infusing this detailed world with his characters and story lines. “I extrapolate everything. I sort of distill it down to an outline file, and then from there I write the script,” he says. “I need to smell it. I don’t really make anything up. It’s a process of elimination. I’ll take a little bit of that, a little bit of that, put that together, and then it kind of writes itself.”
Indeed, Den of Thieves 2 isn’t just a dramatized play-by-play—it also incorporates another perfect Belgian heist from 2013, in which a different group of armed men, dressed as police, raided a passenger plane at the Brussels airport and snagged about $50 million worth of diamonds. Gudegast wanted to make sure that he wasn’t providing a how-to blueprint, so he kept the basic structure of the original crime (the inside man renting an office, the specialists cracking each security measure, the general sequence of events) while blending and updating various elements from other heists he’d researched (dancing around rotating CCTV blind spots, shimmying across buildings with a Vietnamese pull cross, and using an invisibility shield to hide from cameras). It shouldn’t exactly be a surprise that the third act of Pantera veers off into an explosive getaway set piece—Gudegast was never going to end his action movie with a heroic turn by an angry local with a passion for environmentalism.
Mostly, though, Gudegast was interested in the psychology of thieves like those in the School of Turin. How could they keep investing in and executing such massive heists with so many life-altering risks at play? How did they spend years of their lives on something that might not even work on the day they planned it for? As Donnie expresses halfway through the movie, “It’s not about the money; it’s about the challenge.” Gudegast tends to agree. “It’s really nothing more than that,” he says. “They long to have a goal-oriented life, a structure. It gives them a reason for being. It’s like this thing you’re working towards, to figure out. That’s their everything. That’s what they live for, that buzz.”
There are elements of truth to that. You can’t devote yourself to something that long without learning to embrace the risk, without loving the prospect of making the impossible possible. Though, as Selby notes, as long as we keep attaching high monetary value to diamonds, sophisticated criminal outfits will keep going after them. “If somebody told the School of Turin that they could spend two and a half years to bypass all the security and get a few hundred million in diamonds, or we can just hand it to you, which one are you going to pick?” Selby says. “In real life, it’s generally about the money.”
