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Episode
5 min
Lissin
· Apr 28, 2026
Heist & Con Chronicles
Almost Perfect: The Daring Heists That Nearly Got Away
Unraveling audacious cons—admiring the genius, exposing the flaw, one near-miss crime at a time.
Almost Perfect: The Daring Heists That Nearly Got Away
Lissin
0:00
-4:47
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Transcript
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Transcript
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About this episode
Unraveling audacious cons—admiring the genius, exposing the flaw, one near-miss crime at a time.
0:00
The vault of the Antwerp Diamond Centre was protected by ten layers of security, including Doppler radar, seismic sensors, and a lock with one hundred million possible combinations.
0:15
On February seventeenth, 2003, guards opened its eighteen-inch-thick steel door to find it empty.
0:23
One hundred million dollars in diamonds, gold, and jewels...
0:28
gone.
0:29
The vault’s floor was littered with open, empty deposit boxes.
0:34
There were no alarms.
0:36
No signs of forced entry.
0:38
It was as if the thieves had simply walked through walls.
0:43
The man who made it possible was named Leonardo Notarbartolo.
0:48
He wasn't a master safecracker.
0:51
He was a tenant.
0:52
For eighteen months, he rented a small, shabby office in the Diamond Centre itself.
0:59
He posed as an Italian diamond merchant, making small talk, building trust.
1:05
But his real work started after hours.
1:09
He had a camera, hidden inside a fire extinguisher, pointed at the vault door.
1:15
He had a pen that was also a camera.
1:18
He recorded the guards' routines.
1:21
He photographed the vault's mechanisms.
1:24
He learned the building’s rhythms, its secrets, its blind spots.
1:30
Notarbartolo wasn't alone.
1:32
He was the leader of a small crew known as "The School of Turin," each with a specialty.
1:40
There was the alarm expert.
1:42
The lock-pick.
1:43
The tech genius.
1:44
And a man they called "The Monster" for his raw physical strength.
1:50
For months, they studied Notarbartolo's intel.
1:54
They built an exact, full-scale replica of the vault in a warehouse to practice.
2:01
They figured out that a polyester shield could block the infrared heat sensors.
2:07
That a cheap can of hairspray could temporarily insulate the thermal detectors.
2:14
That a piece of electrical tape could blind a light sensor.
2:19
They reverse-engineered the fortress piece by piece.
2:24
They had a plan for every single one of its ten layers of security.
2:29
The night of the heist, they moved like ghosts.
2:33
They bypassed the alarms.
2:35
They picked the locks.
2:37
They got inside the vault.
2:40
And they spent hours emptying more than one hundred and twenty of its one hundred and sixty deposit boxes.
2:49
Then they vanished.
2:50
It was, for a moment, the perfect crime.
2:54
The police were baffled.
2:56
The insurance companies were panicking.
2:59
Notarbartolo and his crew had driven away, their score in the back of the car, completely home free.
3:07
And then...
3:08
they got sloppy.
3:10
Just one of them.
3:11
On the drive away from Antwerp, one of the thieves got nervous about a bag of garbage in the car.
3:19
It contained the remnants of their work—tape, gloves, empty coffee cups.
3:26
He wanted to get rid of it.
3:28
Notarbartolo told him to burn it, to destroy it completely.
3:33
But the man panicked.
3:35
He just… dumped it on the side of a road in a forest near Brussels.
3:40
Inside that bag, police found a half-eaten ham sandwich.
3:45
They found DNA.
3:46
They also found a receipt from a local electronics store, and security footage of Notarbartolo buying the equipment.
3:56
That was it.
3:57
That was the thread that unraveled everything.
4:01
From a single ham sandwich, detectives connected the DNA to Leonardo Notarbartolo.
4:08
They raided his apartment.
4:10
They found diamonds hidden behind a wall panel.
4:14
Four of the five men were arrested and sentenced.
4:19
Notarbartolo got ten years.
4:21
The perfect heist, a masterpiece of planning and patience, was undone by trash.
4:28
But the police never found the fifth man.
4:31
And they never found the bulk of the one hundred million dollars in stolen diamonds.
4:38
They are still out there, somewhere.
4:41
Lost to the world, just like the ghost who helped steal them.
