Hail to the Thieves: Famous Heists We Love
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A REAL LIFE "OCEAN'S ELEVEN": The 2003 ANTWERP DIAMOND HEIST
HOW THEY DID IT: Not ones to rush into something this big, the Turin boys began laying the groundwork for the project three years prior. Posing as a company owner, Notarbartolo rented an office in the Center in 2000 and proceeded to obtain copies of master keys and learn how the alarm system worked. Then, the group waited for the perfect distraction - the Diamond Games tennis tournament on February 15-16, 2003. As Venus Williams wowed throngs of spectators (many of them Diamond Center employees and security guards), Nortarbartolo's crew used their duplicate keys to sneak into 123 of the building's underground vaults. Simply riding the elevator down to the basement, they deactivated a motion sensor and taped over light detectors. Then, instead of just covering the lenses of the CCTV (closed circuit television) security cameras, they avoided suspicion by replacing the tapes with previously recorded footage. Of course, the biggest hurdle was getting past the vault's 12-inch thick doors. Knowing the doors were equipped with internal magnets that would set off alarms if they detached, the robbers drilled through the bolts, carefully taped the magnets together, and moved them out of the way so that they wouldn't separate. After that, all they had to do was break the locks to the safety deposit boxes, rake in the diamonds, and then quietly flee the scene. To escape undetected, they memorized the surveillance patterns of the 24-hour police patrols outside the building. (Hey, they didn't have nicknames like “The King of Thieves” and “The Magician with the Keys” for nothing.) Amazingly, even though the heist took place early Sunday morning, authorities didn't discover anything suspicious until Monday. HOW THEY GOT CAUGHT: Here's a tip for would-be thieves: If you leave the crime scene with a bag full of diamonds and then dispose of the bags on the road leading out of the city, make sure you don't leave your half-eaten sandwich in one of them. Inspectors used DNA evidence found on the food to nab Notarbartolo, and further DNA traces in the vault to arrest two other gang members. In 2005, he was convicted, sentenced to 10 years in prison, and fined $1.3 million. Meanwhile, none of the diamonds have been recovered. Some have microscopic inscriptions on them that would reveal their identity, but only if the thieves ever decide to sell them legally. (Photo and a very interesting in-depth story by Joshua Davis at Wired Magazine) BRUTE STRENGTH AND NUMBERS: THE SECURITAS DEPOT ROBBERY
HOW THEY DID IT: Picture this: You're driving along a road in Stockbury, England, when the whirring sirens of an unmarked police car startle you from your evening commute. You roll down your window and chipper police officer tells you he needs to speak with you - in his vehicle. Oops, you've just been kidnapped. That's how Colin Dixon was unwittingly reeled into one of the biggest heists of the century. The crooks handcuffed Dixon - a manager at the Securitas cash collection and money transport company - and told him his family would be killed if he didn't comply. Meanwhile, fellow gang members abducted Dixon's wife and son, posing once again as police offices with a fake story about “an accident involving your husband”. The manager led the thieves to the Securitas depot in Tonbridge, where the criminals- wielding guns and cloaked in knit caps - accosted another 14 employees and made off with a giant trick full of loot. While the event was certainly traumatic for all the victims, fortunately, no one was injured. HOW THEY GOT CAUGHT: Good old-fashioned police work. Apparently, it takes a lot of accomplices to stage multiple kidnappings. In total, investigators have arrested about 30 people in connection with the crime, including drivers, face police, a car dealer, a salesman, a roofer, and a hairdresser named Kim Shackleton. Guess where she's headed? BRAZIL'S BIG DIG: THE TUNNEL RATS BANK ROBBERY
HOW THE DID IT: For the 23 or so suspected gang members involved in this operation, the first step was posing as a company that was renting an office building- which just happened to be located near a bank. Cleverly enough, the crooks set up an artificial business as an artificial turf com - called Grama Sintetica, complete with artificial employees and fancy logo. For weeks, a group of men worked around the clock digging a tunnel leading two city blocks over to the Central Bank building Somehow, the process was so shrewdly executed that Grama Sintetica's neighbors failed to notice that a van was transporting several loads of dirt away from the building each day. And if their stealthy moves don‘t seem impressive enough, consider the tunnel itself: In it, the gang installed electric lighting, air conditioning, and wood-paneled walls (to make sure the tunnel didn't collapse). To pull off the heist, the gang managed to break through the bank's three-and-a-half-foot-wide vault floor, using (as police later discovered) a bolt cutter, a drill, an electric saw, and a blow torch. Over the course of the weekend, they eventually removed five containers full of bank notes, weighing nearly 7,700 lbs. Unbelievably, nobody discovered the theft until that Monday. All told, the heist required experts in electrical engineering, global positioning systems, excavation, and, of course, theft. The most brilliant idea, though? Picking a crowded, noisy area in Brazil for the heist, reasoning that no one would notice the sound of tools and digging in the daily commotion. HOW THEY GOT CAUGHT: The thieves did a good job of covering their tracks (they used a white powder at the crime scene to hide fingerprints), but apparently, tunneling underneath nations is a little trickier. Attempts to transport the money out of the country using truck transports and chartered planes failed, and the assumed mastermind behind the theft, Luis Ribeiro, eventually turned up murdered. So far, the police have arrested a few dozen suspected members of the gang. NOT-SO-GOOD FELLAS: THE LUFTHANSA AIRPORT HEIST
HOW THEY DID IT: The wrong way - with brute force. Even
though it became source material for the 1990 film “GoodFellas HOW THEY GOT CAUGHT: Unlike the other heists, in which some gang members fled the country to hide, the Lufthansa Airlines gangsters stuck around. Not only that, but they made the mistake of displaying their newfound wealth a bit too obviously. The police had a pretty good idea who was behind the crime, and it wasn't long before snitches implicated Werner and a few others. Many of the participants were murdered before they could squeal, while still others became informants and joined the Witness Protection Program. Werner, who organized but didn't participate in the actual theft, was the only one convicted for a role in the heist. |
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The article above, written by John Brandon, appeared in the Jan - Feb 2007 issue of mental_floss magazine. It is reprinted here with permission. Don't forget to feed your brain by subscribing to the magazine and visiting mental_floss' extremely entertaining website and blog today!
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If
you thought George Clooney's Ocean's Eleven character was smooth, check
out the velvet finish on criminal mastermind 
February
must be a good month for crime. In February 2006, three years after the
Antwerp diamond heist, a Securitas money depot in England was robbed by
a band of thieves who coordinated simultaneous kidnappings. They made
off with a jaw-dropping $92.5 Million (US) in cash - most of it unmarked.
Today, it's considered the largest cash robbery in British history. (Photo:
PA, via 
Sometimes
there's a light at the end of the tunnel, other times, there's $72 million
(US). Such was the case in August 2005, when a group of criminals in Fortaleza,
Brazil, used their 260-ft. long secret passageway to make off with some
serious loot. The trick: Spending three months excavating the thing and
tediously sneaking vanloads of dirt past the thousands of workers in the
busy urban area above. (Photo: AP, via 
In
1978, Lufthansa Airlines employee Louis Werner knew two important things:
First, that a Lufthansa airplane occasionally transported unmarked bills
from West Germany to New York's Kennedy Airport, where they were temporarily
held in nothing more than cardboard boxes locked inside a vault. Second,
that he owed about $20,000 in gambling debts to his bookie.
”
(plus several books and even a few copycat crimes), the Lufthansa Airport
Heist was a brutal affair. Using a few helpful tips from Werner, infamous
crime lord Jimmy Burke put together an operation that involved several
phases - breaking into the airport's cargo terminal, handcuffing employees,
and subduing guards. Once inside the vault, they found 72 boxes of cash
and jewelry totaling about $6 million (instead of the $2 million they'd
expected). As for the getaway, the gang used bloody force to make sure
no employees reported the crime until long after they'd left the airport.
The entire robbery took only 64 minutes, but it became one of the most
complex and lucrative heists in U.S. history.
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The World's Biggest Diamond Heist
In 2003, Leonardo Notarbartolo and his associates broke through ten layers of security and helped themselves to a stash of diamonds in a vault below the Antwerp Diamond Center. The estimated value of the diamonds taken ranges from 12 million to over 100 million dollars. The loot has never been found, but Notarbartolo served a prison sentence in Belgium. He tells how he pulled off the heist, in an exclusive article that reads like a Hollywood film.
The guys took turns yanking the contents out. Since they had memorized the layout of the vault in the replica, they worked in the dark, turning on their flashlights only for split seconds—enough to position the drill over the next box.
But in those muffled flashes, they could glimpse their duffel bags overflowing with gold bars, millions in Israeli, Swiss, American, European, and British currencies, and leather satchels that contained the mother lode: rough and polished diamonds. They resisted the urge to examine their haul; they were running out of time.
Read the rest of the story at Wired. Link
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10 Facts About Diamond You Should Know
Better a diamond with a flaw than
a pebble without one.
-
Confucius
Photo: Fotografiert von Mario Sarto
There's no denying that diamonds are a traditional symbol of romance and love. Why, a man needs a diamond ring to ask the woman of his dream to marry him, right? But was it always that way? Did you know that someone worked very, very hard to make diamond rings de rigueur in marriage proposals? Or that diamonds aren't actually very rare at all? Or that they make lousy investments?
Here 10 Facts About Diamonds You Should Know:
1. The Earliest Use of Diamonds: Polishing Axes
If
you ask a hundred people what they think of first when they hear the word
"diamond," I bet you get 99 who say a diamond engagement ring.
Truth is, the majority of diamonds mined today are used for industrial purposes - and that may also be the very first use of diamonds by humans.
Harvard physicist Peter Lu and colleagues found that ancient Chinese used diamonds to polish ceremonial burial axes in the late stone age or over 4,500 years ago.
The axes, which are made from corundum (or ruby in its red form and sapphire in other colors), were polished to a mirror finish. Corundum is the second hardest naturally occurring substance on Earth and close examination of these axes revealed that they could've been made only with diamond abrasives. (Source)
It's quite fitting since today, 80% of mined diamonds (about 100 million carats) are used for the industrial purposes of cutting, drilling, grinding, and polishing.
2. Diamonds Are Not The Hardest Substance on Earth
"Diamonds
are the hardest substance on Earth" is practically a mantra for jewelers
trying to impress you with its physical properties if you're not swayed
by its beauty. Too bad it's not true: while diamonds are the hardest natural
mineral substance, it is not the hardest substance known to man.
In 2005, physicists Natalia Dubrovinskaia and colleagues compressed carbon fullerene molecules and heating them at the same time to create a series of interconnected rods called Aggregated Diamond Nanorods (ADNRs or "hyperdiamond"). It's about 11% harder than a diamond. (Photo: ESRF)
3. De Beers: The Diamond Cartel
We
can't talk about diamonds without talking about De Beers, the company
that single-handedly made the diamond industry what it is today. De Beers
was founded by Cecil Rhodes, who also founded the state of Rhodesia which
later became Zambia and Zimbabwe. The Rhodes Scholarship is also named
after him, and funded by his estate.
Rhodes started by renting water pumps to miners during a diamond rush in 1867 at Kimberley, South Africa. He expanded into mines and about twenty years later became the sole owner of all diamond mining operations in the country.
Rhodes built De Beers into a diamond cartel (well, they prefer "single-channel marketing" and since they're one company, they're technically a monopoly). De Beers mines diamonds, then handle their sales and distribution through various entities (in London, it's known as the innocuously named Diamond Trading Company; in Israel, it's simply called "the syndicate"; in Belgium, it's called the CSO or Central Selling Organization.)
If you want to buy diamonds from De Beers, you've got to play by their rules: diamond are sold in events known as "sights." There are 10 sights held each year, and to buy, you have to be a sightholder (these are usually diamond dealers whose business is to have the stones cut and polished and then resold at diamond clearing centers of Antwerp, New York, and Tel Aviv).
The diamonds are sold on a take-it-or-leave-it basis. A sightholder is given a small box of uncut diamonds priced between $1 and $25 million. De Beers set the price - there is no haggling and no re-selling of diamonds in uncut form. It is rare for sightholders to refuse a diamond package offered to them, for fear of not being invited back. And those who dare to purchase diamonds from other sources than De Beers will have their sightholder privilege revoked.
In the early days, De Beers controlled about 90% of the world's diamond supply. Today, its monopoly on diamonds has been significantly reduced. It is estimated that the cartel now controls about 60 to 75% of the world's diamond trade (source)
4. So Why The Name 'De Beers'?
De Beers was actually named for the brothers Johannel Nicholas de Beer and Diederik Arnoldus de Beer, whose farm Cecil Rhodes bought when diamond mines were discovered on it.
5. Are Diamonds Rare?
Diamonds
are actually quite rare in the past but not any more. While it's true
that the process of extracting diamond is quite laborious (mines move
many tons of dirt per carat of diamond found) and that gem-quality diamonds
are relatively few (only about 1 in 1 million diamonds are quality one
carat stones, only 1 in 5 million are 2-carat; and 1 in 15 million are
3-carat), diamonds are not rare in an economic sense because supply exceeds
demand. (Photo: mafic
[Flickr])
To maintain the high prices of diamonds, De Beers creates an artificial scarcity: they stockpile mined diamonds and sell them in small amounts.
Perhaps De Beers chairman Nicky Oppenheimer said it best: "diamonds are intrinsically worthless, except for the deep psychological need they fill." (mental_floss, vol 7 issue 6, p. 21 "Diamond Engagement Rings" by Rebecca Zerzan)
6. Moon-Sized Diamond
So
- diamonds aren't rare on Earth, and it may not be rare in space either.
In 2004, astronomer Travis Metcalfe of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center
for Astrophysics and colleagues discovered a diamond star that is 10 billion
trillion trillion carats!
The cosmic diamond is a chunk of crystallised carbon, 4,000 km across, some 50 light-years from the Earth in the constellation Centaurus.
It's the compressed heart of an old star that was once bright like our Sun but has since faded and shrunk.
Astronomers have decided to call the star "Lucy" after the Beatles song, Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds. (Source)
According to scientists, if you wait long enough, our own sun will eventually turn into one such large diamond star!
7. Famous Diamonds
Just because they're not rare, it doesn't mean that there aren't exceptional diamonds. There's the 45-carat Hope Diamond (and its famous Curse), the mystical Koh-I-Noor Diamond, and the largest diamond ever found, the 546 carat Golden Jubilee.
But
this is Neatorama, so here's a truly fascinating story about the Bokassa
Diamond. In 1977, a crazy Central African dictator named Jean-Bédel
Bokassa declared himself an emperor and asked Albert Jolis, the president
of a diamond mining operation, for a diamond ring (he made sure Jolis
knew that nothing smaller than a golf ball-sized rock would do!)
Jolis didn't have the money to buy such a large stone but if he didn't deliver one, his company would lose the mining concession in Central Africa. So he devised a clever ruse: Jolis found a large piece of black diamond bort (a poorly crystallized diamond usually fit only to be crushed into abrasive powder) that curiously resembled Africa in shape. He ordered the diamond polished and mounted on a large ring. A one-quarter carat white diamond was then set roughly where the country is located on the continent.
Jolis presented the "unique" diamond to Bokassa, and the clueless emperor loved it! He thought that the $500 ring was worth over $500,000! Just two years later, when Bokassa was overthrown in a coup, Jolis heard that he went into exile with his prize diamond ring, and noted wryly: "It's a priceless diamond as long as he doesn't try to sell it." (Source)
8. The Most Brilliant Advertising Campaign of All Time: A Diamond Is Forever
The 1930s was a bad decade for the diamond industry: the price of diamond had declined worldwide. Europe was in the verge of another war and the idea of a diamond engagement ring didn't take hold. Indeed, engagement rings were considered a luxury and when given, they rarely contained diamonds.
In 1938, De Beers engaged N.W. Ayer & Son, the first advertising agency in the United States, to change the image of diamonds in America. The ad agency suggested a clever ad campaign to link diamonds to romance in the public's mind. To do this, they placed diamonds in the fingers of Hollywood stars and suggested stories to newspapers on how diamond rings symbolized romance. Even high school students were targeted:
N. W. Ayer outlined a subtle program that included arranging for lecturers to visit high schools across the country. "All of these lectures revolve around the diamond engagement ring, and are reaching thousands of girls in their assemblies, classes and informal meetings in our leading educational institutions," the agency explained in a memorandum to De Beers.
The agency had organized, in 1946, a weekly service called "Hollywood Personalities," which provided 125 leading newspapers with descriptions of the diamonds worn by movie stars. [...] The idea was to create prestigious "role models" for the poorer middle-class wage-earners. The advertising agency explained, in its 1948 strategy paper, "We spread the word of diamonds worn by stars of screen and stage, by wives and daughters of political leaders, by any woman who can make the grocer's wife and the mechanic's sweetheart say 'I wish I had what she has.'" (Source)
In 1948, an N.W. Ayer copywriter named Frances Gerety, had a flash of inspiration and came up with the slogan "A Diamond is Forever." It's a fitting slogan, because it reminds people that it is a memorial to love, and as such, must stay forever in the family, never to be sold (see below). Ironically, Gerety never married and died a spinster. (Source)
But equating diamonds with romance wasn't enough. Toward the end of the 1950s, N.W. Ayer found that the Americans were ready for the next logical step, making a diamond ring a necessary element in betrothal:
"Since 1939 an entirely new generation of young people has grown to marriageable age," it said. "To this new generation a diamond ring is considered a necessity to engagements by virtually everyone." The message had been so successfully impressed on the minds of this generation that those who could not afford to buy a diamond at the time of their marriage would "defer the purchase" rather than forgo it. (Source)
Then the clever ad agency went one step further. N.W. Ayers noted that when women were involved in the selection of the engagement ring, they tended to pick cheaper rings. So De Beers encouraged the "surprise" engagement, with men picking the diamond on their own (with the clear message that the more expensive the stone, the better he'll look in the eyes of a woman).
They even gave clueless men a guideline: American men should spend two months wages, whereas Japanese men should spend three. Why? Because they can:
But the guidelines differed by nation. A "two months' salary" equivalent was touted in the United States, whereas men in Great Britain got off the hook with only one month. Japan's expectation was set the highest, at three months. I asked a De Beers representative why the Japanese were told to spend so much compared to the Americans or the English.
"We were, quite frankly, trying to bid them up," he answered. (Source: The Heartless Stone: A Journey Through the World of Diamonds, Deceit, and Desire by Tom Zoellner)
In 1939, when De Beers engaged N.W. Ayer to change the way the American public view diamonds, its annual sales of the gem was $23 million. By 1979, the ad agency had helped De Beers expand its sales to more than $2.1 billion (Source).
9. Diamonds are Actually Lousy Investments
De Beers is quite famous for never lowering the price of diamonds. During the Great Depression, the cartel drastically cut supplies and stockpiled diamonds to prop up their price. But do diamonds make good investments?
Unless you're a certified diamond seller, the answer is no: you won't be able to sell a diamond ring for more than what you pay for it. And the reason is simple: with diamonds, you buy at retail and sell at wholesale, if you can sell it at all.
In 1982, Edward Jay Epstein wrote an intriguing article for The Atlantic, titled "Have You Ever Tried to Sell a Diamond?" In it, he wrote about an experiment to determine a diamond's value as an investment.
The [Money Which?] magazine conducted another experiment to determine the extent to which larger diamonds appreciate in value over a one-year period. In 1970, it bought a 1.42 carat diamond for £745. In 1971, the highest offer it received for the same gem was £568. Rather than sell it at such an enormous loss, Watts decided to extend the experiment until 1974, when he again made the round of the jewelers in Hatton Garden to have it appraised. During this tour of the diamond district, Watts found that the diamond had mysteriously shrunk in weight to 1.04 carats. One of the jewelers had apparently switched diamonds during the appraisal. In that same year, Watts, undaunted, bought another diamond, this one 1.4 carats, from a reputable London dealer. He paid £2,595. A week later, he decided to sell it. The maximum offer he received was £1,000.
Why is there no active after-market for diamonds? It is estimated that the public holds about 500 million carats of gem diamonds - if a significant portion of the public begins selling, then the price of diamond would plummet. To prevent this from happening, the diamond industry spent a huge sum in making diamonds "heirloom" properties to be passed down for generations, keeping the price of diamond artificially high (so people wouldn't be tempted to unload them for fear of losing money) and discourage jewelers from buying diamonds from the public.
10. Artificial Diamonds
The
idea of making artificial diamond isn't new. H.G. Wells proposed exactly
such a thing in his story "The Diamond Maker" in 1911. Since
then, scientists have come up with ways to create synthetic diamonds and
diamond simulants like cubic zirconia - but experts could always tell
them apart. Until now.
In the past decade, scientists have perfected a technique called Chemical Vapor Deposition, where carbon gas cloud is passed over diamond seeds in a vacuum chamber heated to more than 1,800 degrees. In a matter of days, they are now able to "grow" diamonds that are virtually indistinguishable from natural ones, even to the experts:
Seeking an unbiased assessment of the quality of these laboratory diamonds, I asked Bryant Linares to let me borrow an Apollo stone. The next day, I place the .38 carat, princess-cut stone in front of Virgil Ghita in Ghita's narrow jewelry store in downtown Boston. With a pair of tweezers, he brings the diamond up to his right eye and studies it with a jeweler's loupe, slowly turning the gem in the mote-filled afternoon sun. "Nice stone, excellent color. I don't see any imperfections," he says. "Where did you get it?"
"It was grown in a lab about 20 miles from here," I reply.
He lowers the loupe and looks at me for a moment. Then he studies the stone again, pursing his brow. He sighs. "There's no way to tell that it's lab-created." (Source)
But if you think that the price of diamond will fall precipitously, think again. Companies that make cultured diamonds like Apollo and Gemesis aren't stupid: they're not going to kill the goose that laid the diamond egg by flooding the market with cheap stones.
End Note
Whether you love or hate them, diamonds are endlessly fascinating. I'll be the first to acknowledge that we haven't touched topics like blood diamonds, J. Walter Thompson's brilliant campaign to insert diamond engagement rings into Japan's wedding custom, and so on.
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