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

bars for tenants with parking spaces and watching the video monitors as they badged through the doors that led from the parking deck to blocks A and B. The entry door to C Block was accessed with a key, not a badge; tenants were not supposed to use that door, so there was no camera observing it.
    Kamiel was arguably the busiest of the four guards. He sat in the security booth at the main entrance on Schupstraat watching the video monitors and the foot traffic swarming in and out of the Diamond Center during business hours. He checked visitors’ IDs and issued temporary passes, phoning the receptionists in the diamond businesses upstairs to confirm that strangers had legitimate appointments. It was his job to buzz open the fenced day gate to the safe room when tenants wanted access to their safe deposit boxes. At the end of the day, he rewound the videotapes that recorded all the images from the video monitors, labeled them with the date, and put fresh tapes in the VCRs.
    Neither Andre nor Kamiel patrolled the halls. According to an account of their later statements to police, they relied purely on technology for the building’s security. Ironically, although he controlled access to the vault for more than one hundred tenants who stored invaluable wealth in their safe deposit boxes, Kamiel had never even gone to the bottom level of the Diamond Center. All he knew of the vault was what the video monitors showed him.
    The picture that took shape in Notarbartolo’s mind was one of a staff that had grown dangerously complacent. The Diamond Center had never been robbed, and, based on what he could discern about the staff’s habits, no one expected it to be. They trusted the security of the Diamond District in which the building was located to deter most clear-thinking thieves, and they were certain that the impressive vault with its bombproof door would keep out anyone foolhardy enough to try anything.
    Sitting alone in his office, Notarbartolo assembled something of a multimedia treasure map. The videotapes, the blueprints, and the reams of sketches he drew in the long hours spent sequestered in his office pretending to trade diamonds were equal parts informative and tantalizing. Through them, the School of Turin could easily imagine following this treasure map to riches.

    Notarbartolo’s reconnaissance proved to the School of Turin that it had picked the right building to knock over. The staff’s lax approach to security stood in stark contrast to the other main diamond office buildings in the district, the four bourses. It was highly unlikely that Notarbartolo would even have gotten into the trading hall of a bourse to see for himself just how soft a target the Diamond Center was in comparison.
    On any given weekday, the tables in the main trading hall at the Beurs voor Diamanthandel, which was founded in 1904, could be found scattered with coffee cups, crumpled napkins, mobile phones, day planners, and gemstone loupes. What a visitor noticed, however, wasn’t the cafeteria-style trappings, but the diamonds blinking like white Christmas lights in the sunlight cascading from the room’s twenty-five-foot windows. The loose diamonds were laid out on small white velvet pads or in little tissue-paper packages known as diamond papers unfolded into the shape of a paper box. They were handed around casually like someone passing the salt; when they were poured into metal measuring cups at the electronic scale on each table, they sounded like marbles being poured into a skillet.
    The diamonds traded here and at the three other members-only bourses in the Diamond District were often sold in packages of hundreds of carats at a time in values that would blow the mind of anyone not accustomed to making transactions involving true wealth.
    Diamonds are the most valuable commodities by weight known to man. A pocketful of ten single-carat brilliant-cut diamonds with exceptionally good color, cut, and clarity—altogether weighing only