Hello everyone… salutations. Welcome to “Tea & Gemstones,” a podcast for talking about anything and everything to do with jewelry. No detail is too small, no fact is uninteresting. I am your host, Jen. I am alifetime sparkle enthusiast who created this podcast to give my fellow jewelry lovers a little break… I want these episodes to be like auditory sweatpants. Just comfortable, easy to put on… makes you happy. No matter what I’m talking about, I hope it feels like you’ve set up in your living room with friends to chat, laugh and learn. Haha, it is very on brand for me to be laying out expectations for relaxation… but before we get started with this episode, I want to ask, if you are enjoying this podcast, it would be awesome if you could leave a rating and a review. On Apple Podcasts you can do both, on Spotify it’s just a one out of five-star rating. Giving the show your rating and reviews is what puts Tea & Gemstones into the search algorithm so we can be discoverable if someone types “jewelry” or “gemstones” into the podcast search bar. A huge thank you to everyone who has left reviews already, at the end of this episode I’m going to give shout outs, so stay tuned for that. Seriously, yall have been wonderfully supportive, as of the end of January, Tea & Gemstones is number one on Apple Podcasts search page for the jewelry category. Okay, enough technology talk, haha, let’s get started.
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Today is February 15th. While for a lot of people the date February 15th only carries the significance of being the day after Valentine’s, the 15th is also a pretty interesting anniversary of an event. And event that like Valentines, is associated with diamonds… but not diamonds gifted in displays of love… no, no. The diamonds of February 15th, all 100 million of them… were stolen. Today is the 19th anniversary of the Antwerp Diamond Heist, aka the largest diamond heist of all time, straight up one of the biggest robberies in the entire world. It’s an enormous criminal act… and yet, no one is currently in jail for it. In fact, only the ringleader of the theft, he is the only one who even served any jail time. And the 100 million in diamonds? Almost entirely unrecovered. But how did this happen? Let me warn you- while this heist story has a very ambiguous ending… the beginning and middle are truly spectacular. I would say it’s like real life Ocean’s 11, except it’s better. So, it all begins with a formidable place. The Antwerp Diamond District. As you might have guessed from the name, haha, the Antwerp Diamond District is located in the city of Antwerp, in Belgium. It covers a several city blocks, about one square mile. About 80% of the world’s rough diamonds pass through the district at some point in their life, especially when they’re a rough stone, because the district has about 380 workshops, employing over 3,500 brokers, merchants, and diamond cutters. In 2003, the year of the robbery, over 3 billion dollars in sales were logged in the district. It’s one of the densest concentrations of wealth in the world. Sounds like a big juicy target, right? I mean, yes, it is… but that target is well defended. For starters, the district has it’s own police force paid for by the Belgium government. There are security cameras everywhere, running 24/7. The entire perimeter has steel columns recessed in the ground that can rise up and prevent any car from getting in or out. In the middle of this high tech mini-town of security, is one building called, rather uncreatively, haha the “Antwerp World Diamond Center.” Built in 1973, this building is the heart of the district. Here merchants can rent out storefronts, office space or a personal apartment. But also… there’s a vault in the Center, and it’s full of safety deposit boxes. This vault was the heist’s target.
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To establish the magnitude of this robbery, we have to discuss the vault. First, it is located two stories underground. There’s an external camera outside right over the door, and cameras all around. There are two locks on the door; one is a combo dial with over 100 million possible combinations, and a key lock that only fits a very specific and unique key… more on that later. The actual door itself is made of 3 tons of solid steel, rated by its manufacturing to be able to withstand over 12 hours of drilling. But never mind how long it would take to drill through; inside this monstrous steel slab are two nifty features: a seismic vibration sensor that would set off an alarm if a drill even started it’s work, and a set of magnets. The magnets were a small panel next to the vault door, almost like one of those plate covers you put over an unused electrical outlet. The magnet panel served to detect if the door latch moved away from the wall. If it did, you guessed it, alarm goes off. If somehow you get through the locks, get the door open without the sensor or magnets going off, behind the door is a steel grate, that also requires it’s own key. So, then if you get through the door and the grate and into the vault itself, inside there’s another security camera watched 24/7 by a guard, a light sensor that triggers an alarm if it, you know, senses light… AND a combo heat and motion sensor that detects any temperature changes to the vault’s air or the movement of a person coming inside. …how do you beat all that? Not alone you don’t. You come in with a vision and you use a team of specialists. Who is the mastermind who saw a possible big score where everyone else would see an impossibility? It’s the ringleader I mentioned earlier, a suave Italian professional thief named Leonardo No-tar-bar-tolo. Leonardo started renting an office in the Diamond Center in 2000… yeah, a full three years before the actual robbery. See, Leonardo had a theory- with all the technology and security features- Achilles heel of the diamond center was complacently. They thought they were un-robbable… therefore, they weren’t on the lookout for thieves.
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For three years, Leonardo made himself part of the everyday background of the diamond center. He played the part of an Italian businessman and ran a semi-legit diamond business. But not only did he rent an office, he also rented an apartment to live in actually inside the center itself, which as a resident he received a 24 hour access key card to come and go freely. As a seller and a resident, Leonardo also got vault access during business hours whenever he wanted, which seems mind-blowing to me, but it’s true! He used this access to his ultimate advantage. Now, like something out of James Bond, Leonardo had teeny tiny camera mounted in the top of a pen he kept poking out of the top of his shirt pocket. He took hundreds and hundreds of covert photographs while he was in the vault, and he and his team used the photos to, get this, create a perfect replica of the center’s vault in a warehouse outside the district. I told you, it’s like real life Ocean’s 11! Before I start telling you exactly how Leonardo and his team beat the center’s defenses… let me introduce you to the four men he recruited… again, like something out of a movie, we only know these men by aliases. There was Speedy: a longtime friend of Leonardo’s, and a good thief, but known to be paranoid and anxious. The next guy’s name was “the Monster”: a very large and strong man who was a world-class lockpicker, electrician, mechanic and driver. The third man was called “the Genius,” now that’s a winning alias, haha no pressure, but don’t worry, he lives up the name- the Genius was apparently an expert in conquering complex alarm systems, which I would say the center’s definitely qualified as complex. The final member of the robbery team rocks the alias of “the king of keys”, who we believe was an older man, called the best key forgers in the world… while the other men on the team received possible identifications from police eventually, the king of keys has remained a ghost all these 19 years, not one whiff of him. So. How did these five men break in and out of the center with 100 million dollars in diamonds? We actually have a lot of information about how they did, both from what they left behind and what Leonardo revealed when questioned by police. The robbery began on Saturday, February 15th. The crew choose a Saturday because the vast majority of the workers and residents of the center were Jewish, meaning Saturday was their Sabbath and no business was done. There also were no guards on duty on the weekend, they put all their faith in the technological defenses, like the sensors and locks, especially. I suppose the wheels of the robbery actually went into motion on the previous day, Friday the 14th. Leonardo went into the vault during business hours, like he had countless times before. Because he was such a regular fixture in the center- remember it’s been three years of him living and working there every single day, the guards didn’t pay any attention to the cameras when he was in the vault. While Leonardo was in the vault on Friday, under the pretense of putting something in his safe deposit box, he sprayed the dual heat and motion sensor with a can of women’s hairspray. This would block the heat sensor from receiving data for the foreseeable future. On Saturday night about midnight, Leonardo and his four-man crew drove up in a rented car and parked nearby. Leonardo stayed in the car with a police scanner to listen and his crew left the vehicle into the night. Now, the diamond center is saturated with video cameras, Leonardo would be very familiar with this fact after living and working there for three years. To avoid all those cameras… the crew just didn’t go start into the center. They actually went next door to a rundown, abandoned office building. The king of keys picked the lock, and they were in. The homerun was that this abandoned office building shared an outdoor balcony garden with the diamond center! In this garden Leonardo had hidden a ladder. The crew used the garden ladder to reach up to a small balcony on the side of the center. This balcony had an infrared sensor on it, but the Genius climbed the ladder and placed a homemade polyester shield carefully in front of the sensor, blocking the crew from detection. Safe from the infrared sensor, the Genius disabled the window alarm. He opened the window, and the crew entered the Antwerp Diamond Center. As they walked down to the vault, they covered the security cameras with black plastic bags. Because of center’s complacently, no one was watching the live streams of the cameras. Now the crew is standing in front of the vault door, with the camera covered by a black bag of course. The three-ton steel door with two locks, the vibration sensor, and the magnets. The Genius began with the magnets. He had created a custom aluminum plate covered in double sided tape. He unscrewed the two bolts holding the magnet panel to the wall and stuck the aluminum plate onto the panel. He could then slide the panel off to the side, away from the door without the magnets ever detecting any movement. The aluminum held the magnets in place, voiding their ability to watch the door. So, the magnets are taken care, but what about the combo dial and the unique physical keyhole? The dial was defeated in the simplest way… Leonardo had recorded the guards spinning the dial with his camera pen. So, that combo dial with over 100 million possibilities? The crew knew the only one that mattered. The simplicity and virtuoso of just recording the guard’s… that’s amazing. But the way the second lock was solved, is kind of maddening, at least, I bet it was for the center security when they found out. So, the unique keylock in the vault door I mentioned earlier, it actually requires a FOOT long physical key to slide in and turn the tumblers. Leonardo had taken sneaky photos and videos of the physical key when the guards had it in their hand to open the vault for him when he was a masquerading center resident, and the king of keys had made a replica. But when they were standing in front of the vault, the king of keys recalled that on the surveillance footage Leonardo had taken, the guards often ducked into a small utility closet near the vault before actually performing the task of opening the massive thing. The king of keys opens the utility closet… and lo and behold, the huge foot long physical key to open the vault is hanging there in the utility closet, on the wall, among the mops and cleaning supplies. The guards didn’t want to schlep it around. So, the king of keys stole the original key and used it to unlock the vault. He actually kept his replica key with him because he didn’t want authorities to know their key system could be copied; and that deception worked, it wasn’t until Leonardo spilled the beans in interrogation that the authorities had any idea about the copycat key. Now, let’s run this down. For just the vault, the crew had bested the cameras, the combo dial lock, the key lock, the vibration sensor (by not drilling just opening the door with the regular locks) and the magnets. At this point, the crew turns all the lights off and swings open the three-ton steel door. No alarms sound. With the lights off- because remember, there’s a light sensor inside the vault, the Monster picks the lock to the steel grate. In practiced form (remember, they had been practicing in their replica vault), the crew moved quickly in the dark. The hair spray burst from Leonardo yesterday protected them from the temperature change of opening the vault door, but the Genius put a Styrofoam box over the dual heat and motion sensor, isolating it. They put a black plastic bag over the interior camera and duct tape over the light sensor. Then the Genius removed a ceiling panel and rewired the alarm system so just in case one of the sensors did try to alert the system, the signal would go nowhere. The crew was in the vault, and safe from detection. Are you rooting for them? As I was researching this… I found myself rooting for them. They’re just being so crafty and smart about this! I mean, stealing is wrong. But this is such a good story. They’re in the vault, and no one knows they’re there. The crew… well, they set to work. Using a special hand crank drill crafted by the king of keys specifically for this job… they tackle the safety deposit boxes. Working from until 5:30am, they emptied 123 of the 160 boxes in the vault, stealing over $100 million in diamonds. They didn’t just steal the diamonds, they stole alllll the legitimizing paperwork for the diamonds too. Duffel bags full to bursting, the crew snuck out of the center the same way they came in, back down the balcony ladder through the joint garden and out the abandoned office building to the waiting car of Leonardo. Oh! On their way out, the crew stole the videotapes from the security cameras, to make their miraculous robbery even more mysterious. The largest diamond heist in the world was done. They were home free…. Right?
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Driving away from the scene of the robbery, the crew was probably feeling pretty good about themselves and what they had just accomplished. Following their meticulous attention to detail, the thieves planned to drive into France and burn all their trash and evidence of their crime, like the gloves they wore the entire time in the vault to avoid leaving DNA. But as they drove, Speedy, Leonardo’s friend, he started to have a panic attack. He didn’t want to be driving around with the evidence… I don’t really follow this logic, because they have $100 million dollars in diamonds, who cares about incriminating paperwork and gloves- but there’s not a lot of logic in panic attacks. Leonardo indulges his buddy, Speedy. ‘Okay, okay, we don’t have to wait to burn our trash in France, let’s pull over and burn it here.” They pull over and carry their paperwork and gear onto some seemingly empty wooden land. Here Speedy continues to panic and doesn’t want to light a fire and draw attention, so he convinces the crew to just throw everything under some bushes. They do, and they drive off. Well. Unlucky for our crew, they do not get to get away with cutting corners. The land they trashed isn’t abandoned, it belongs to a man who has been dealing with local teenagers partying on his property regularly. The very next morning, like just a couple hours later; the man goes through the random trash pile and sees a bunch of envelopes and papers relating to the Antwerp Diamond Center. He calls the cops. The police come and take all the trash to analyze. In the trash, they find a receipt for a sandwich purchased in the wee hours of Saturday morning from a place right outside the diamond center… and the sandwich… which apparently wasn’t very good, was also abandoned with the trash, half-eaten. The police were able to get security footage from the nearby grocery store and saw Leonardo… waiting for his crew who were robbing the vault… Leonardo buying a sandwich. And the police actually pulled DNA from the sandwich and used that to match to Leonardo once they apprehended him. Under police questioning, Leonardo did explain how they had planned and executed the theft. But when the police asked him about the whereabouts for the 100 million in diamonds, Leonardo was like “whoa, whoa, whoa- what? 100 million? We only took 20 million.” He adamantly claimed they had only stolen 20 million in diamonds and the Antwerp Diamond Center was claiming 100 million as insurance fraud. Leonardo’s claim was never really addressed, certainly not proven. Maybe the center was too embarrassed they had been robbed that they inflated the scale of the theft, like somehow that made it more palatable? Like if we’re gonna get robbed, we better really seriously get ROBBED, otherwise how pathetic are we. Well, in 2005 Leonardo (who never gave up the real identities of his crew) was sentenced by the courts at Antwerp to ten years in prison, however in 2009 he got out on parole after only serving four years. But two years later in 2011 he violated parole and had to go back into jail to finish his term until 2017, when he was released. And that was that. While police have some idea who the Genius or the Monster might be, they were never apprehended, certainly never served jail time. And like I said, the king of keys is a straight up ghost. So, remember I said this story has a kinda ambiguous, unsatisfying ending…? Well, that’s the end. The ringleader Leonardo sort of goes to jail- I say “sort of” because he gets out and then goes back in haha And the other four members of the savvy crew, the Genius, the Monster, the King of Keys and Speedy, they’re never caught. Speedy, the one who is sort of responsible for his buddy Leonardo getting nabbed, I do wonder what happened to him. As for the diamonds, whether there were 20 million dollars worth or 100 million dollars worth stolen, the point is a lot of stolen diamonds went out in the world. I always wonder about stones like that. Where did they go, where did they end up? Are they sitting on someone’s finger or glittering on someone’s necklace and they have no idea they’re a stolen Antwerp diamond? Or maybe they’re buried in some secret crime boss’s own vault because he knows exactly what kind of stones they are. Either way, the Antwerp Diamond Heist is legendary. For the sheer boldness audacity of the idea to it’s near flawless execution, it really is a captivating story. People say ‘a diamond is a girl’s best friend,’ but I submit that there isn’t much motivating to a man than diamonds. Maybe gold, haha Maybe the formidability of the diamond center was goal, to conquer it… sure is good advertising for your thieving services if you’re the Genius, or the Monster, or the King of Keys. Speedy might need a new profession, though. But where is Leonardo now? The ringleader of the heist was straight up banned from the country of Belgium and in 2017 after his second release from prison, Leonardo went to Italy. Supposedly he sold the rights to his story to JJ Abrams to make a movie, but then Abrams declined. Pity… I would have liked to see, though with the fantastical nature of the heist, I think it would blur the lines between truth and fiction.
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That’s all for this episode of Tea & Gemstones. Check out the show notes for a link to our website which has full transcripts of every episode. Our theme song is by Joseph McDade with additional music by Audionautix. Tea & Gemstones is on Instagram, at Tea and Gemstones.
I want to take a moment to thank everyone who has left reviews, here come the shout-outs haha, Thank you to Nons2017, JeVrla, D L Mcewen, Casey Buck, Gab Edits, Rachel TX, whittingtonrachel, tiffy9876, Stephbug77, Rose Ninny, GardenFlyer 2, SBJ Reston, MarzanoStudios, H Marzano 3, Leslielistens, Whatnowcar, G Bid Vuno, jewels of the trade and Cabreraba. If I missed your name, I’m so sorry- that’s the list I have as of the start of February. Please know that as all of you are walking around in the world, my gratitude is following you around like a happy shadow. Okay, I’m out of here haha I have been your host, Jen. Until next time, Stay Sparkly.
T&G EPISODE 014
BIBLIOGRAPHY
“The $100 Million Belgian Diamond Heist Explained.” YouTube, uploaded by RealLifeLore, 16 Mar. 2019, www.youtube.com/watch?v=45el4Qlaj-E&ab_channel=RealLifeLore.
“History.” Antwerp World Diamond Centre, 26 July 2016, www.awdc.be/en/history.
Wikipedia contributors. “Antwerp Diamond District.” Wikipedia, 9 Jan. 2022, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antwerp_diamond_district.
