Almost Perfect: The Dazzling Near-Misses of History’s Greatest Heists

The hundred-million-dollar Antwerp Diamond Heist of 2003 was unraveled by a half-eaten salami sandwich. Last week, on 'Almost Perfect,' we looked at breathtaking capers that were foiled by a single slip-up, but the story of Leonardo Notarbartolo and the School of Turin is in a class of its own. It’s a masterclass in criminal genius, undone by the most mundane mistake imaginable. For over two years, Notarbartolo posed as an Italian diamond merchant, renting a small, unremarkable office inside the Antwerp World Diamond Center. This gave him a key. It gave him access. But most importantly, it gave him time.

Time to study the building’s legendary vault. The vault was protected by ten layers of security. Doppler radar. Infrared heat sensors. A seismic sensor that could detect the slightest vibration. A lock with one hundred million possible combinations. It was considered, by everyone, to be impenetrable. Notarbartolo and his team, a hand-picked group of specialists, saw it differently. They saw it as a puzzle. So, they began solving it, piece by piece. They placed a tiny camera above the vault door, hidden inside a fire extinguisher, to record the guard dialing the combination. They figured out that a simple can of women's hairspray could temporarily blind the infrared heat sensors.

They made a perfect copy of the vault’s supposedly un-copyable key. On the night of February fifteenth, 2003, they went to work. They disabled the alarms. They used the stolen combination. They opened the vault door. They then faced a final, locked steel gate. For this, they had a custom-built aluminum tool to trip the magnetic bolts from the inside. One by one, they defeated every single system designed to stop them. Inside, they emptied 123 safe deposit boxes, walking away with over one hundred million dollars in diamonds, gold, and cash. They were ghosts. No alarms triggered.

No witnesses. No clues. So how did it all fall apart? One of Notarbartolo’s accomplices was tasked with burning the evidence. But instead of doing that, he panicked. He drove out to a wooded area just outside of Brussels and simply dumped a garbage bag full of their tools, notes, and trash. A local landowner found the bag the next morning. And inside, among the debris, police found a receipt from a nearby supermarket. They found a half-eaten salami sandwich. And they found DNA. Notarbartolo's DNA. Security footage from the supermarket showed him buying that exact sandwich just before the heist.

It was the thread that unraveled everything. The police had his name, his face, and his genetic profile. After two years of meticulous, high-tech planning… after defeating a hundred-million-dollar security system… the whole thing came crashing down because one of them got hungry and the other got nervous. Notarbartolo was arrested within days. He later claimed it was all an insurance fraud, that they only stole about twenty million. But the vault wasn't even insured; its security was supposed to be the insurance. So what does it all add up to? It's the oldest pattern there is.

The human element. Most of the diamonds were never found, and Notarbartolo became a legend. But his story proves that the most complex lock in the world is still no match for the simplest human error.