Read Online Flawless: Inside the Largest Diamond Heist in History by Scott Andrew Selby, Greg Campbell - Free Book Online
Authors: Scott Andrew Selby, Greg Campbell
Tags: True Crime
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spare house keys for the occasional customer who wandered in. Fontanella was an expert lock picker. His business provided the perfect excuse to continually improve his craft. In his backroom workshop that was off limits to customers, he spent his days disassembling locks, manufacturing dummy keys, and perfecting the art of breaking and entering.
A regular at Fontanella’s store was his friend Giovanni Spurgo. What Fontanella was to keys, Spurgo was to alarms. Spurgo studied motion detectors, heat monitors, and light sensors so he could understand their tolerance thresholds.
There were others the police kept an eye on, including a man who, at almost seventy years old, was the grandfather of Turinese thieves, the elderly Giovanni Poliseri. He went by the nickname John the Tunisian or the King of Thieves. The police also kept an eye on Pietro Tavano, a close friend of Notarbartolo’s.
The one exception to the “keep a low profile” rule was Ferdinando Finotto, a master crook who was a jack-of-all-trades. According to the police, he knew a little about all the specialties, including alarms, locks, computers, and front companies. Where most of the other men moving in and out of this criminal orbit had, like Notarbartolo, perfected their ability to blend into their surroundings, Finotto couldn’t help but leave a memorable impression, as no manner of dress could disguise his imposing figure. Finotto stood well over six feet tall and weighed somewhere in the range of two hundred and forty pounds. His head was shaped like an anvil, and he did nothing to mitigate it with the flattop buzz cut he preferred. Had he been inclined to make an honest living, he could have been a longshoreman or a lumberjack. Instead, Finotto was convicted of attempting to rob the KBC bank in Antwerp in 1997. At the time, the bank was located on Pelikaanstraat, right outside the Diamond District.
Finotto took his skills to Antwerp in 1995, in the wake of the Italian government’s crackdown on ’Ndrangheta and other Mafia organizations through countrywide indictments that swept from Turin to Naples. With three hundred warrants issued and one hundred and fifty people arrested, it was the largest criminal roundup in Italian history. Authorities code-named it Operation Olympus—apropos, since some of the Mob’s most important gods in its pantheon were nabbed, indicted, and jailed for life. Though the arrests didn’t change much in the Mob’s historical turf cities like Naples, the cessation of overt Mob crime in satellite cities like Turin meant Martino and his force finally had the time and resources to tackle the rest of Turin’s problems. Suddenly, it wasn’t such a good time to be a jewel thief in Turin.
Many Turinese criminals found refuge beyond Italy’s borders, taking advantage of the city’s location at the doorstep of the Alps. Anyone who needed to get lost for a while could hop in an Alfa and, with one high-speed run, be in France or Switzerland within the hour. It wasn’t so dramatic for the School of Turin; those with businesses and homes had no need to flee or go underground. They just needed to find somewhere else to employ their extracurricular skills for a while.
Finotto chose to scope out the Diamond District; he set up a front company in Antwerp called Max Diamonds in order to open an account at KBC bank. For weeks, he and a few accomplices cased the bank thoroughly, using a small hidden video camera to film its every nook and cranny. On the night of the heist, however, the thieves got no farther than outside the building before they blew it. Around 8:30 p.m. on Sunday, February 2, 1997, while trying to disarm an alarm, they accidentally set it off. Finotto and his accomplices sprinted into the night, leaving their tools behind. By the time a security unit arrived to investigate, no one was there. The only clues were the burglary tools that had been left behind and some minor damage to a door. The bank opened as usual on
A regular at Fontanella’s store was his friend Giovanni Spurgo. What Fontanella was to keys, Spurgo was to alarms. Spurgo studied motion detectors, heat monitors, and light sensors so he could understand their tolerance thresholds.
There were others the police kept an eye on, including a man who, at almost seventy years old, was the grandfather of Turinese thieves, the elderly Giovanni Poliseri. He went by the nickname John the Tunisian or the King of Thieves. The police also kept an eye on Pietro Tavano, a close friend of Notarbartolo’s.
The one exception to the “keep a low profile” rule was Ferdinando Finotto, a master crook who was a jack-of-all-trades. According to the police, he knew a little about all the specialties, including alarms, locks, computers, and front companies. Where most of the other men moving in and out of this criminal orbit had, like Notarbartolo, perfected their ability to blend into their surroundings, Finotto couldn’t help but leave a memorable impression, as no manner of dress could disguise his imposing figure. Finotto stood well over six feet tall and weighed somewhere in the range of two hundred and forty pounds. His head was shaped like an anvil, and he did nothing to mitigate it with the flattop buzz cut he preferred. Had he been inclined to make an honest living, he could have been a longshoreman or a lumberjack. Instead, Finotto was convicted of attempting to rob the KBC bank in Antwerp in 1997. At the time, the bank was located on Pelikaanstraat, right outside the Diamond District.
Finotto took his skills to Antwerp in 1995, in the wake of the Italian government’s crackdown on ’Ndrangheta and other Mafia organizations through countrywide indictments that swept from Turin to Naples. With three hundred warrants issued and one hundred and fifty people arrested, it was the largest criminal roundup in Italian history. Authorities code-named it Operation Olympus—apropos, since some of the Mob’s most important gods in its pantheon were nabbed, indicted, and jailed for life. Though the arrests didn’t change much in the Mob’s historical turf cities like Naples, the cessation of overt Mob crime in satellite cities like Turin meant Martino and his force finally had the time and resources to tackle the rest of Turin’s problems. Suddenly, it wasn’t such a good time to be a jewel thief in Turin.
Many Turinese criminals found refuge beyond Italy’s borders, taking advantage of the city’s location at the doorstep of the Alps. Anyone who needed to get lost for a while could hop in an Alfa and, with one high-speed run, be in France or Switzerland within the hour. It wasn’t so dramatic for the School of Turin; those with businesses and homes had no need to flee or go underground. They just needed to find somewhere else to employ their extracurricular skills for a while.
Finotto chose to scope out the Diamond District; he set up a front company in Antwerp called Max Diamonds in order to open an account at KBC bank. For weeks, he and a few accomplices cased the bank thoroughly, using a small hidden video camera to film its every nook and cranny. On the night of the heist, however, the thieves got no farther than outside the building before they blew it. Around 8:30 p.m. on Sunday, February 2, 1997, while trying to disarm an alarm, they accidentally set it off. Finotto and his accomplices sprinted into the night, leaving their tools behind. By the time a security unit arrived to investigate, no one was there. The only clues were the burglary tools that had been left behind and some minor damage to a door. The bank opened as usual on
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