Flawless: Inside the Largest Diamond Heist in History by Scott Andrew Selby, Greg Campbell Read Free Book Online Page B

even remotely plausible would bubble to the surface: I’ve been robbed .
    The police were left as confounded as the store owners at these breakins: at first glance, there didn’t seem to be any breaking at all. Although the details varied from crime to crime, the detectives would usually find that the locks often worked perfectly, the video cameras still functioned, the alarms were still armed, and the windows were intact. And yet, the merchandise had vanished. Aside from the obvious tasks like dusting for fingerprints and questioning the staff, there was little more they could do. The thieves rarely left any evidence or at least not enough to identify suspects. But the lack of clues was a clue in itself; it pointed to a level of expertise that is rare among criminals. It’s harder to rob a jewelry store than other businesses; the whole building is sealed tight with special locks, the doors and windows are alarmed, video cameras monitor everything, and motion detectors can be calibrated to be so sensitive that they’ll signal for help if a mouse wanders in front of them. The goods are always under extra locks in their cases—which themselves have alarms—or they’re stored in bombproof safes in the back office, which of course is also locked.
    In the absence of evidence, the first necessary assumption was that these were inside jobs. But that avenue never panned out. The only other possibility was that a gang of extraordinarily smart, very careful thieves was running an organized jewelry theft ring in Turin.
    Because the heists were never committed using violence, intimidation, or other strong-arm tactics—and because the losses were usually mitigated by a jeweler’s insurance coverage—their investigation fell to a lower priority than most police detectives would have liked to admit. High-profile matters like Mafia-backed drug running, arms trafficking, and murder took precedence.
    That’s not to say the string of burglaries was forgotten or that detectives quickly gave up trying to solve them. Law enforcement agencies around the world are skilled at investigating crimes with precious few leads, using scientific methods to gain insight into the criminals they track.
    The police in Turin, however, didn’t need science to suggest where they should start looking for their jewelry thieves. It would not have taken much gumshoe work to learn that one of the most unrepentant car thieves in the city had recently gotten into the jewelry business. According to one newspaper report, Notarbartolo didn’t seem surprised by a visit from police officers curious to know how he managed to fill his store’s display cases with rings, bracelets, watches, and necklaces when just a few years before he’d written them a letter begging for his driver’s license to be reinstated so that he could get a job delivering paper for a local company. He’d come a long way, the police observed with suspicion, from scraping for low-paying jobs as a delivery boy to being his own boss at a high-end jewelry store.
    In 1981, detectives searched Notarbartolo’s house looking for evidence of stolen goods in connection with a robbery the year before. They found none, but they discovered and confiscated a Beretta .22-caliber pistol with the serial number filed off. Notarbartolo said that he kept it for protection from the gang of robbers plaguing his industry. It was harder to explain the ten blasting caps for C-4, the extremely powerful plastic explosive, that the police also found.
    Notarbartolo was arrested in connection with the robbery and although he was acquitted, he fell permanently in the sights of Martino’s Mobile Squad, if not as a prime suspect in the robbery spree then at least as a person of interest. His name was added to a special watch list, and, in 1987, he was given a red booklet that cops called a “preceptive document” but which criminals called a joke.
    The size and shape of a passport, the document was required as part of