Free Flawless: Inside the Largest Diamond Heist in History by Scott Andrew Selby

video surveillance equipment, badge readers, and motion detectors; the manufacturer of the equipment that controlled the garage doors; and the type of lock on every door and safe between them and the diamonds. Standing around filming these things with a hidden camera was risky.
    But Notarbartolo was nothing if not confident in his abilities, leading him to his most suspicious overt move to that point. During his reconnaissance, he stopped to talk to Julie Boost, wearing a slightly embarrassed expression and explaining that he had an unusual request for the building manager: he wanted a copy of the building’s blueprints.
    Notarbartolo explained that he was considering upgrading to a different office in the future, maybe a bigger space that could accommodate his supposedly growing business. The blueprints, he said, would help him decide which suite of offices would be best for his plans. As risky as it was, the request was an effective probing of the building’s human defenses. Cameras and alarms are only as effective as the people monitoring them, and the Diamond Center staff had already shown themselves to be lacking by renting an office to him without bothering to check his background.
    Diamond Center staff provided Notarbartolo with the requested blueprints, including those for level -2, where the vault was located. He could hardly believe his luck.
    On the map, the safe room didn’t look very impressive. It wasn’t even the biggest room on the floor. There was also a workshop where staff members could make repairs to equipment, and a large storage room where unused furniture was piled among the furnaces, water heaters, and air-conditioner ducts. Each room was measured to the inch. The safe room, according to the blueprint, was twenty-seven feet wide by twenty-eight feet deep.
    Getting the blueprints was the biggest testament so far to Notarbartolo’s ability to pull the wool over anyone’s eyes, even those like Boost who believed themselves to be hyperalert for scams and con artists. It didn’t take newcomers long to figure out that Julie Boost was not well liked among the diamond dealers who rented offices in the Diamond Center. Part of the reason was that she was unusually nosy.
    Though Notarbartolo didn’t speak Dutch (or its local dialect of Flemish), he spoke fluent French in addition to his native Italian, and so was able to communicate easily with Boost and the other French-speaking staff members at the Diamond Center. Careful to stay under the radar by keeping his interaction with other tenants to careful nods and “bonjours,” he maintained a relative silence that belied his acutely attuned ear. Notarbartolo was on the alert for every snippet of overheard gossip and idle chatter, and from what he could glean, it seemed many found Boost often unnecessarily stern, rude, and domineering. Her boss, Marcel Grünberger, had little interest in the daily affairs of the Diamond Center, preferring instead to focus on his diamond-trading business. She was given free reign to manage the building as she saw fit, and she ruled over it like the nosy superintendent of a New York City apartment building. Given her habits, Notarbartolo must have been amazed when he thought about how well he’d snowed her.
    Boost wasn’t the only one on the staff Notarbartolo came to understand. There weren’t many employees, and through a combination of overheard conversation and surreptitious observation, Notarbartolo began populating his mental map with personalities.
    There were the two caretakers, referred to as concierges: Jorge Dias De Sousa and Jacques Plompteux. Although he was Portuguese, Jorge’s name was pronounced “George” by nearly everyone, and Jacques was simply “Jack.” They lived in separate apartments in the Diamond Center: Jorge, the more senior of the two, lived on the second floor of B Block. His apartment faced the vacant lots that were visible from Notarbartolo’s office; on days when Portugal played an