Over the weekend of 15 and 16 February 2003, thieves went two floors down into the vault of the Antwerp Diamond Center at Schupstraat 9-11 and broke open 109 of its 189 safe deposit boxes. They took loose diamonds, gold, jewellery, cash and securities, and most of it has never been found. The man convicted of organising it, Leonardo Notarbartolo, was caught within a week. The Antwerp diamond heist is still described as the largest diamond theft on record, and almost every detail of it beyond the broken boxes is disputed by somebody.

That is the useful way to read the story: as two accounts that share a vault and little else. One was built by the Antwerp police and tested in a Belgian court. The other was told by Notarbartolo himself, from prison, to a magazine. They agree on the date, the address and the empty boxes. They disagree on how much was taken, who wanted it taken and how the crew spent the night.

The vault on Schupstraat

Schupstraat is one of the three short streets of the diamond district, a few minutes’ walk from Antwerp Central Station, the railway cathedral round the corner. The vault under the Diamond Center was considered one of the safest rooms in the city. Guinness World Records lists ten layers of security, among them cameras, infrared sensors, radar and a combination lock. The descriptions of that lock already disagree: Guinness gives it 100 million possible combinations, a 2025 account in People gives it a million. The other layers, as later reconstructed, were a heat and motion detector, a seismic sensor, Doppler radar and a magnetic field across the vault door, all inside a heavily guarded district with the building’s own private security staff.

Notarbartolo had a key to all of it, legitimately. He set up a diamond company as a front, rented an office in the building and with it a safe deposit box in the vault, which gave him a reason to be downstairs. How long he prepared is itself in dispute: the Guinness entry says four years, other accounts say more than two.

What the police found

According to the reconstruction, the crew dealt with the alarms one by one. The heat and motion sensor had been coated with hair spray on an earlier visit, the screws on the plates of the magnetic lock had been loosened and held in place with tape, and on the night itself an aluminium plate kept the two halves of the magnet together while the door opened. A polystyrene shield covered the infrared sensor, tape covered the light sensor on the ceiling, and a crowbar dealt with the day gate. The boxes, each with its own key and a three-letter combination, were opened with a hand-cranked tool built for the job.

The crew’s undoing was rubbish. After the robbery, Notarbartolo and an accomplice drove the bags of debris from the vault and their safe house out of Antwerp and dumped them off the E19 motorway towards Brussels. The land belonged to August Van Camp, who found the litter the next morning and called the police. Among it were an invoice with Notarbartolo’s name on it, a business card with an accomplice’s address and telephone number, videotape, and a half-eaten salami sandwich that later yielded DNA. Antwerp’s diamond squad arrested Notarbartolo on 21 February 2003, when he came back to the Diamond Center.

The two detectives who led the investigation, Agim De Bruycker and Patrick Peys, became part of the story. Peys told ABC News in 2004: “It’s unimaginable that something like that happens because the buildings are secured quite well.”

The School of Turin in court

The crew came from a loose network of Italian thieves known as the School of Turin. Notarbartolo later gave his four companions nicknames, Speedy, the Monster, the Genius and the King of Keys, without saying which name belonged to whom. Belgian police identified three of them as Pietro Tavano, Ferdinando Finotto and Elio D’Onorio. The fourth, an older man said to be an expert key forger, has never been identified.

In 2005 the Belgian courts sentenced Notarbartolo to ten years in prison and a fine of more than €1 million, and Tavano, Finotto and D’Onorio to five years each, with the last three tried in their absence. D’Onorio was extradited to Belgium in November 2007, the month Finotto was arrested in Italy. Notarbartolo was released on parole in 2009. One of his conditions was to compensate the victims, which he never did; a European arrest warrant followed in 2011, and in 2013 he was arrested at Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris, changing planes on his way from the United States to Turin. He served the rest of his sentence until 2017.

The other version

In 2009 Notarbartolo gave his account to Joshua Davis of Wired, and it is a different heist. In his telling, a diamond merchant hired the crew and offered him €100,000. The job was an insurance fraud: someone else had already emptied many of the boxes, so the thieves carried off bags that were mostly air, about €18 million worth, or some $20 million, while the owners claimed the rest. He has never named the merchant.

The police disagree on nearly every point that can be checked. Notarbartolo said the crew worked in the dark; the guard who found the scene found the lights on. He described rehearsing in a replica vault; the police found black tape over the light sensor. He said the bags were nearly empty; the police found that the thieves had sorted through the loot inside the vault. The vault had been refused insurance because of its security flaws, which makes an insurance fraud hard to arrange. “Not one detail of Leo’s story can be confirmed by the facts in the investigation,” De Bruycker told the Columbia Journalism Review, which criticised the magazine for printing the thief’s version without asking the police for theirs.

The size of the haul has never been settled either. The figure most often given, Guinness’s among them, is more than $100 million. Notarbartolo says about $20 million. A review of Flawless, the 2010 book on the case by Scott Andrew Selby and Greg Campbell, put it at nearly half a billion dollars. Every account agrees on one thing: most of it was never recovered.

The version worth believing is the court’s, because it rests on things the police could touch: tape, keys, an invoice and a sandwich. Notarbartolo’s rests on his word, and after his release he was stopped in Milan carrying about a kilogram of diamonds, which he said were low-grade industrial stones and which Belgian police say experts judged to be of high quality.

On screen

The story has been good for television ever since. Paramount optioned the film rights, with J. J. Abrams as producer, and the option expired. Amazon released Everybody Loves Diamonds, an Italian series starring Kim Rossi Stuart, on 13 October 2023. Netflix followed on 8 August 2025 with Stolen: Heist of the Century, with interviews with Notarbartolo and with both detectives. Notarbartolo is unrepentant in it: “We felt proud of doing something so strong and powerful.”

The city has absorbed the story into its own. When DIVA, the museum of diamonds, jewellery and silver on Suikerrui, opened in 2018, one of its six rooms was the Vault, a strongroom given over to diamond crime. The Schupstraat diamonds themselves have never surfaced in a museum or anywhere else.

August Van Camp had only rung the police about litter.