Flawless: Inside the Largest Diamond Heist in History

FLAWLESS

FLAWLESS

INSIDE THE LARGEST
DIAMOND HEIST IN HISTORY

SCOTT ANDREW SELBY
and
GREG CAMPBELL

New York / London
www.sterlingpublishing.com

STERLING and the distinctive Sterling logo are registered trademarks of Sterling Publishing Co., Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Selby, Scott Andrew.

Flawless: inside the largest diamond heist in history / by Scott Andrew Selby and Greg Campbell.

    p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-4027-6651-0

1. Robbery–Belgium–Antwerp–Case studies. 2. Jewelry theft–Belgium–Antwerp–Case studies. 3. Diamond industry and trade–Belgium–Antwerp. I. Campbell, Greg. II. Title.

HV6665.B422003 S45 2010

364.16’287362309493222–dc22

2009040766

2  4  6  8  10  9  7  5  3  1

Published by Sterling Publishing Co., Inc.
387 Park Avenue South, New York, NY 10016
© 2010 by Scott Andrew Selby and Greg Campbell
Distributed in Canada by Sterling Publishing
c/o Canadian Manda Group, 165 Dufferin Street
Toronto, Ontario, Canada M6K 3H6
Distributed in the United Kingdom by GMC Distribution Services
Castle Place, 166 High Street, Lewes, East Sussex, England BN7 1XU
Distributed in Australia by Capricorn Link (Australia) Pty. Ltd.
P.O. Box 704, Windsor, NSW 2756, Australia

Manufactured in the United States of America
All rights reserved

Sterling ISBN 978-1-4027-6651-0

For information about custom editions, special sales, premium and
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For Sweden:
The Land of Wild Strawberries and Dalahästar

—S
COTT
A
NDREW
S
ELBY

For Rebecca and Turner

—G
REG
C
AMPBELL

Map of the Diamond District

Map of the Vault

“Let us not be too particular. It is better to have old
second-hand diamonds than none at all.”

—Mark Twain

CONTENTS

A Note from the Authors

Prologue

Chapter One: The Trojan Horse

Chapter Two: The School of Turin

Chapter Three: Probing Missions

Chapter Four: Where the Diamonds Are

Chapter Five: The Plan

Chapter Six: Safeguards

Chapter Seven: My Stolen Valentine

Chapter Eight: The Heist of the Century

Chapter Nine: One Man’s Trash Is Another Man’s Treasure

Chapter Ten: Been Caught Stealing

Chapter Eleven: Checkmate

Chapter Twelve: The Trial

Chapter Thirteen: The Loot

Epilogue

Joint Acknowledgments

Appendix

Selected Bibliography

Notes

Index

About the Authors

A NOTE FROM THE AUTHORS

Researching and reporting on the 2003 Antwerp Diamond Center heist presented unique challenges. Most significantly, Belgium’s justice system is not tilted in favor of public disclosure. Court records, police reports, and other documents are not readily available in most instances, and it is illegal for police detectives to discuss their investigations with journalists. This is the only criminal case in which detectives were permitted to break with that protocol.

The story in these pages was assembled from many sources in several countries. Key documents were discovered in a variety of places, as if collected during a scavenger hunt, and interviews with important characters took place in locales ranging from seedy public parks and taverns to ultramodern prisons and ritzy diamond offices. Assembling this book has been much like assembling a puzzle, the pieces of which were found throughout Europe, sometimes in unlikely places. What emerged was not only a spectacular story about the heist of the century, but also a wide array of conflicting details, divergent opinions, and incongruous theories.

Most facts about the diamond heist are clear and indisputable. Others are less so. Even some detectives disagree about the precise course of events. We strove to present the most accurate representation of the crime as possible through deduction, logic, common sense, and triangulation of facts from reliable sources. Where there is a dispute as to what happened, it is noted in the text or in the endnotes.

With a crime such as this—one that produced equal parts awe and conjecture to the degree that it has achieved mythical proportions—it’s fitting that there remains some mystery as to precisely how it was pulled off. Only a small group of men know for sure, and to date not one of them has provided a full and credible explanation, if they’ve spoken about it at all.

Scott Andrew Selby and Greg Campbell
October 2009

PROLOGUE

Ali Baba expected to find only a dark and obscure cave; and was much astonished at seeing a large, spacious, well-lighted and vaulted room . . . He observed in it a large quantity of provisions, numerous bales of rich merchandise, piled up, silk stuffs and brocades, rich and valuable carpets, and besides all this, great quantities of money, both silver and gold, some in heaps and some in large leather bags . . . He took up at several times as much as he could carry, and when he had got together what he thought sufficient for loading his three asses, he went.

—
The Arabian Nights

The white-tiled floor of the vault was littered with diamonds, pearls, emeralds, rubies, gold, and silver. Empty velvet-lined jewelry cases, cardboard cigar boxes, and tin-clasped metal containers lay amid sparkling gemstones of every imaginable cut, color, clarity, and carat. There were ancient heirlooms, gilded bond notes, a Rolex watch, and a brick of solid gold heavy enough to stub toes. Loose stones rolled and bounced like marbles as the detectives picked through the debris, their low gasps and whistles of amazement echoing softly in the bright underground chamber. Detective Patrick Peys thought that if he were to shovel it all up, pour it into any one of the empty and discarded containers scattered about, he would have enough wealth to finance a decadent retirement not only for himself but also for the five other detectives in his unit of specialized diamond-crime investigators.

Like everyone else who descended to the bottom floor of the Antwerp Diamond Center that day—Monday, February 17, 2003—Peys needed some time to process the enormity of what he saw. He was no stranger to audacious crimes committed—or at least attempted—in Antwerp’s high-security Diamond District, but he’d never seen anything like this.

By almost any measure, the safe room two floors underground was as impenetrable a fortress as any to be found in the tightly protected Diamond District. Its walls of brushed-metal safe deposit boxes, which stood pillaged of an amount of treasure yet to be calculated, were inside a room equipped with a light sensor, a motion detector, and an infrared heat detector. Each of the safe deposit boxes had been locked with a key and a three-letter combination known only to its owner, yet more than half of them now stood open and empty. The room itself was secured with a foot-thick, double-locked, bombproof steel door armed with a magnetic alarm, as well as a locked, gated inner door that could only be opened with a buzzer from the control booth on the main floor. Both of those doors stood wide open that morning, undamaged.

These physical barriers were only the capstone of the vault’s security. Over the weekend, when the crime occurred, the building had been sealed with heavy, rolling metal barriers that covered locked plate glass doors at the main entrance and heavy mechanical vehicle arms at the garage entrance. Closed-circuit television cameras monitored the building’s entrances, corridors, and elevators as well as the antechamber to the vault, the small foyer that the elevators opened into. The building itself was situated in the heart of one of the most secure square miles on Earth, within what insurance investigators called the Secure Antwerp Diamond Area, a three-block canyon of gray glass-and-concrete buildings as well defended against thieves as Fort Knox. The district was protected with retractable vehicle barriers at either end to prevent cars from entering—or leaving—and was blanketed from every possible angle by a multitude of video cameras. Those cameras were monitored around the clock by a dedicated, heavily armed police force whose sole job was to prevent theft. In fact, there was a police security booth only forty yards from the Diamond Center’s front entrance and, in the other direction, a full-service police station just around the corner.

In the Diamond Center’s main corridor two stories above the vault, panic gripped tenants who enumerated the contents of their safe deposit boxes to police officers and insurance investigators. One dealer lost a million dollars in cash alone. A woman who had inherited her husband’s box and its contents upon his death found herself suddenly destitute; the large gemstones and irreplaceable heirlooms left to her by her husband were meant to finance her remaining years, and now they were gone.

Peys looked down at the piles of wealth and debris scattered across the floor. What was rolling under his feet—those gems and jewels, those scattered and discarded riches, the individual treasures of the building’s tenants who had stored them in the vault under the reasonable assumption that they would be safer here than in any bank—were the items the thieves had left behind. They had robbed and ransacked more than they could carry.

The detective was momentarily overwhelmed by the scale of the heist. Someone had overcome all of these security measures and made off with an untold fortune of diamonds, jewelry, precious metals, and cash without tripping a single alarm or injuring anyone. Peys didn’t say it out loud—not at the moment, anyway—but he couldn’t help but be awed by the skill required for such a heist.

That thought was quickly followed by another, darker realization: whoever had pulled off this seemingly perfect crime would be impossible to find.