Antwerp Diamond Heist (2003)

During the weekend of 15–16 February 2003, thieves broke into a vault two floors beneath the Antwerp Diamond Center, in the tightly guarded Antwerp diamond district of Antwerp, Belgium, and stole loose diamonds, gold, silver, and other jewelry that authorities valued at more than $100 million — one of the largest robberies on record. The vault was protected by an advanced combination lock, infrared heat detectors, a seismic sensor, Doppler radar, and a magnetic-field alarm, inside a building with its own private security force.

Leonardo Notarbartolo, a professional thief, had rented an office in the Diamond Center more than two years earlier, gaining access to a safe deposit box in the vault and the ability to study the building's routines. According to accounts attributed to him, the group installed a hidden camera above the vault door to record guards entering the combination, transmitting the footage to a device concealed inside a fire extinguisher.

Sometime before the robbery, Notarbartolo used a visit to the vault to spray hair spray on its thermal-motion sensor, disabling it, and the crew loosened the screws on the vault's magnetic-lock plates earlier in the week; during the break-in, a custom aluminum plate held the plates together to keep the alarm's magnetic field from breaking. The thieves used a two-part key together with the vault's combination to open the door, then forced the day gate with a crowbar. Inside, a polystyrene shield blocked one thief's body heat from an infrared sensor, and tape placed over a ceiling light sensor let the group work with the lights on. A hand-cranked device the crew had built was used to pry open 109 of the vault's 189 individually locked safe deposit boxes; early reports, including one from BBC News, put the number at 123.

The group returned to Notarbartolo's Antwerp apartment afterward, and he and an accomplice later dumped garbage from the heist and their safe house along the E19 motorway between Antwerp and Brussels. A landowner discovered the discarded material the next morning and notified police, who traced items in the debris — including DNA from a partially eaten salami sandwich — back to Notarbartolo. Detectives from Antwerp's Diamond Detective Squad arrested him on 21 February 2003, five days after the robbery, when he returned to the Diamond Center.

Investigators linked the robbery to a loose network of Italian thieves known as the School of Turin. Notarbartolo described four accomplices only by nicknames and declined to say which alias matched which person; Belgian authorities identified three of them as Pietro Tavano, Ferdinando Finotto, and Elio D'Onorio. A fourth accomplice, described as an elderly, highly skilled key forger, was never identified.

The Antwerp court of appeal convicted Notarbartolo of orchestrating the heist and sentenced him to 10 years in prison in 2005; he was paroled in 2009. A European Arrest Warrant was issued for him in 2011 after he violated his parole by failing to compensate the heist's victims, and he was arrested again in 2013 at Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris, then made to serve the remainder of his sentence until 2017. Tavano, Finotto, and D'Onorio were each sentenced to five years in prison.

In a later interview, Notarbartolo said a diamond merchant had hired the crew and that the theft was actually worth far less — about €18 million ($20 million) — with the difference intended to support an insurance-fraud scheme. Because the vault itself had been denied an insurance policy over its security flaws, that account is considered implausible. Most of the stolen diamonds, gold, and jewelry have never been recovered.