How the Boldest Heists Were Planned

In February 2003, the contents of more than 100 boxes were taken from the vault of the Antwerp Diamond Center. The door was guarded by a combination lock, magnetic contacts, a motion sensor, a heat detector, and a seismic sensor. The burglars did not break through anything from outside: a couple of years earlier, the group's organizer, Leonardo Notarbartolo, had rented an office in the same building as a diamond dealer. With an access pass, he went in during the day like everyone else and calmly watched where the sensors were and how security patrolled the floors.

In Fortaleza in 2005, the same logic worked, only from outside. The group rented a house next to the Central Bank and told neighbors they sold artificial turf: that explained the trucks and bags of soil they removed every day. They dug a tunnel about 80 meters long for roughly 3 months, with supports, lighting, and ventilation. It reached the concrete floor of the vault from below.

All the preparation is for one thing: a window when no one will look inside. The Antwerp vault was opened over a weekend, the tunnel in Fortaleza emerged over a weekend too, and at London's Hatton Garden in 2015, they entered the basement of a safe-deposit facility over the Easter holiday, 4 consecutive non-working days. There, an older crew drilled through a concrete wall with an industrial diamond drill, failed to get inside on the first night, left, and returned the next: the time buffer allowed them to make a mistake.

And almost everything falls apart afterward. The Antwerp group was found through their trash: bags containing papers and remnants from the vault were thrown into a wooded strip by the highway. The Hatton Garden crew were caught through cameras that recorded their car and through conversations they had after the job. The break-in itself was flawless by then. What failed was what no one had prepared for: how to live afterward.

That is why stories of boldness almost always turn out to be stories of patience. Some details are known only from participants' accounts: Notarbartolo told journalists a version in which they practiced on a replica of the vault, and it cannot be verified. But the verifiable part - the rental, the cover story, the calendar - matches across different cases.