Full Script

INTRODUCTION

I remember the moment when I realized I was in trouble. I was skirting the outside of a large open-air market in Sao Paulo, Brazil. I wanted to find the section I’d been told about before diving into the mass of people shopping. I thought I was being smart, avoiding the risk of being pickpocketed.

 But more likely, I was like a mouse, foraging on the forest floor, while a hungry snake watches over, waiting for the right moment. By the time the mouse realizes they’re being stalked, it’s too late to escape.

 The strike was sudden – one blow to my neck surprising me, another one hitting my leg, causing me to stumble. In a split-second there was a hand in my pocket; quickly and subtly diving for my wallet.

 I didn’t pull off any heroics, didn’t use any self-defense techniques. The only reason I kept my wallet is that it jammed against the opening of my pocket as the thief pulled at it. Not willing to cause a scene by wrestling for it, they abandoned their attempt. I was lucky. Most people would have lost all their valuables. I should thank whoever made those pants.

 In shock, still trying to process what had happened, I spun around to face my attackers. What I saw wasn’t a gang of hulking brutes or wild-eyed maniacs. It was just three teenaged boys, strolling along carelessly and innocently, not even looking at me. I remember yelling, though I can’t remember what, I didn’t exactly have a plan for this situation. But of course, their casual demeanor and my yelling made me seem the crazy one.

 The more I recovered from the adrenaline of the moment, the more I appreciated the artfulness of it. They had observed me, determined in advance which pocket held my wallet. They coordinated the moment of the strike so that they could vanish into the crowd as instantly as they’d struck me. This wasn’t brute force, this took practice and trust. 

As I reflected on the experience, I started to wonder about the talent that can be found in the criminal world. I’m not here to excuse or condone burglary – doing something illegal with flair or aplomb doesn’t suddenly make it legal. Yet, all over the world to this day, people are pulling off crimes that demonstrate skills, imagination, and daring that could make them wildly successful in other fields; if they chose to pursue them. In this episode of My Dark Path, we’re examining what it takes to pull off a truly audacious theft; and what might have motivated the thieves behind them. 

***

Hi, my name’s MF Thomas; I’m an author and a lifelong fan of strange stories from the dark corners of the world. Growing up, I was enthralled by any hint of exciting, forbidden knowledge that waited behind the names and dates we learned in school.  And these days, as I travel the world, there’s nothing I enjoy more than to get off the traditional tourist map and find a place or story that has been overlooked, dismissed or ignored.

This is the My Dark Path podcast. In every episode, we explore the fringes of history, science and the paranormal.  What’s unique about My Dark Path?  Every topic, every destination is a place I’ve explored in person during my travels.  This podcast isn’t a retelling of a Wikipedia article.  Instead, we will explore unique topics that will intrigue and excite; and every once in a while, send a shiver down your spine. So, if you geek out over these topics…. you’re among friends here at My Dark Path. And since friends stay in touch, please let me know your thoughts via email at explore@mydarkpath.com.  I’d love to hear from you.

To see content related to every episode, visit MyDarkPath.com.  When you’re there, register for the My Dark Path newsletter and you’ll be entered for frequent drawing for a unique book or other curiosity.  Also, you learn more about the Explorer’s Society, my membership program that offers exclusive episodes, unique and curious items, plus access to amazing live events.  Lastly, thank you for listening.  You have more choices than ever about where to spend your time.  I’m grateful that you’ve chosen to spend time here, with me, walking the Dark Paths of the world, together.  Let’s get started.

***

PART ONE
It was supposed to be a victimless crime. $70 million in untraceable cash, stolen from a Banco Central in Brazil. It was destined for the bank’s incinerator. It belonged to no one. Nobody pulled a gun or took a hostage to steal it. In fact, the crime wasn’t even detected until the next day – when employees of the bank arrived at work to find an 80-meter-long tunnel leading into their vault – a vault which had suddenly been emptied.   

Two months later, 26-year-old Luis Fernando Ribeiro turned up dead on the side of an isolated road - his body ravaged by bullet holes and his wrists bruised from tight handcuffs. By then, the authorities knew he had masterminded the Banco Central heist. Journalists had one question: was it worth it? If we’re going to answer that question, we need to take a look at Ribeiro’s life, and the opportunities it presented him.

Brazil is full of unregulated and impoverished communities known as favelas. Favelas rarely have any of the services so many of us take for granted, like healthcare, schools, or even jobs. They have to come up with their own way to generate electricity, running water, and other basic needs. They’re cities within cities, ignored and neglected by the government.

The most famous of the favelas are in the hills in and around Rio, where makeshift homes are practically stacked on top of each other. The people living here are severely neglected, trying what they can to survive in a world rigged against them. 

Crime is a way of life here. Often, the only way that offers you a chance to get ahead. Joining a gang is a badge of honor, of power, of prestige.

Luis Fernando Ribeiro grew up in the favelas of Fortaleza, Brazil’s fifth largest city. The largest favela in Fortaleza, Bom Jardim, is home to 20,000 impoverished Brazilians. It sprouts up on the edge of a literal garbage dump. Some days, locals can dig up food or even drugs from the dump – or maybe something of value to pawn off. Every day, they breathe in the toxic fumes of rotting waste. This was Ribeiro’s world - he would have spent his childhood stepping barefoot over dirty needles and lumps of trash, told to stay inside when the streets got too crowded with guns and drugs. But no one can stay in for eternity – and sooner or later, he was bound to enter those streets himself, looking for safety, and maybe, an opportunity to escape.

Ribeiro got into the drug trade young and moved up quickly. He had killed a number of people in his line of work – which was a signifier of success. Still, Ribeiro seemed like he had a chance to do something else. He was a smart kid – really smart – known by his friends for his creative thinking and big ideas. By 2005 he was one of the top drug dealers in Fortazela; but it’s not a life you can walk away from. If Ribeiro was going to truly escape the world of the favelas, he was going to need to try something much more audacious. So he hatched a scheme to pull off one of the biggest bank robberies in history; and to do it without killing anybody.

He couldn’t pull off something on that scale alone. It’s believed that he was a part of the Premeiro Comando da Capital – or PCC – Brazil’s most powerful mafia. In addition to the drug trade, they also committed robberies and kidnappings on a regular basis. Through the PCC, Ribeiro would have access to some of the most experienced, most daring, and most vicious criminals in Brazil. But such access didn’t come for free – if Ribeiro wanted to pull off a job, he was going to owe the PCC a major cut.

As I started to read about Ribeiro’s preparation, I was struck by the uncanny resemblance of his work to the steps you would take to open a small business. He identified an opportunity. He recruited employees with a diverse skillset, over 40 robbers in all. He needed to operate in the right location, so he found real estate near the bank and rented it. And, in order to access the capital and resources to bootstrap his vision into reality, he needed a backer. And in his world, that wasn’t a commercial bank or a Silicon Valley unicorn, it was his bosses in the mob.

This wasn’t an impulsive cash grab, it was a complex, audacious plan, requiring months of patience, and the ongoing management of his unruly criminal staff to make sure none of them got sloppy. I’ve known CEOs who wouldn’t have been able to execute a plan like this. According to Brazilian journalist Demitri Trúlio, Ribeiro hired “people who were engineers, people who were surveyors…they even had a pre-guide that they hired to draw a straight line to show exactly where they were going.”  They paid a former bank security guard to share sensitive information about the vault. Another man they hired, Davi da Silva, had participated in the biggest jail break in South American history; he dug the tunnel that led to the escape of 108 fugitives, including himself. The team gave each other cartoonish nicknames like “The German” and “The Tortured.” Da Silva, naturally, was known as “The Big Digger.” 

For a headquarters, Ribeiro needed to get close to Banco Central, so they could dig a tunnel long enough to reach. He also needed a cover for their activities so that they could blend in with the rest of the neighborhood – innocent enough that no one walking past it would think twice. They settled on a residential house about a block away from the bank. The lease was under the name of Paul Sergio de Souza. 

They disguised the residence as a landscaping company. It sat beside a rundown motel owned by a man named Marcos, who, like most people in the area, wasn’t a stranger to the world of crime and drugs. After the heist, he shared his memories with reporters of the time when, quote, “a guy called Paulo Sergio turned up in a van and the place stayed empty for 15 days. Then he brought some workers, put up the awning and opened up his artificial lawn business.” End quote. Marcos didn’t think much of it – he wasn’t in the market for a new lawn.

Ribeiro’s gang exercised extraordinary discipline in maintaining their disguise. Their van was painted with the landscaping service’s logo. They covered the lawn with synthetic grass, and kept it neat and orderly. They made hats with the company logo and placed ads in the local paper. They even went door to door, introducing themselves to neighbors.

Landscaping was the perfect façade for the robbers – they needed an excuse to be seen with all those mounds of dirt that surfaced as they dug their tunnel. And the ruse worked – even when some members of the gang had trouble keeping their secret. Marcos remembered, quote “the one who was being very friendly to everyone around here was called Paulo Sergio. There was once that he told me he was doing some work at Banco Central, but I didn’t suspect anything because there was no mess,” end quote. It’s a tantalizing lesson – how much you can hide behind the veneer of normalcy and respectability. That comes up in all the stories we’re looking at today.

Even when it came to the tunnel, Ribeiro was careful to treat his employees well. For three months, workers took turns in eight-hour shifts. Ribeiro had paneled walls installed to reduce cave-ins, and ventilation to circulate air flow. There are warehouse workers in legitimate businesses all over the world that don’t get treated this well.

The tunnel was tall enough to stand in upright and wide enough to walk through without a struggle. It was imperative that people could move easily inside it – because soon, they’d have to make the trip over and over again, while carrying heavy loads of cash. $70 million dollars in bills weighs over three and a half tons.

Ribeiro’s team faced shockingly few obstacles in implementing his plan. Seemingly, the only problem the diggers ran into was when they came across some unexpected piping that temporarily blocked their route. 

The police estimated that the gang spent around $200,000 to construct the tunnel. They also had the cost of falsifying a business, renting a property, employing workers, and paying for getaway cars and plane tickets. Not to mention the fee that Ribeiro would have to pay to PCC. From what little is known about them, the guess is that they usually demanded at least one to two million to be involved in big jobs. Ribeiro’s gang would need to steal a remarkable amount of money if they wanted to make a profit on this venture. But that’s exactly what they did. 

It was just before 8:00 am on Monday, August 8th, 2005 when employees arrived for their shift at Banco Central. When they had left work the previous Friday, the bank’s vault had been stacked with $70 million in cash. Since it was due to be burned, the bankers hadn’t recorded the serial numbers on the bills. They were completely untraceable. 

The employees opened the vault, and found all $70 million gone. Confusion turned into horror when they noticed that the highly secure vault - one meter thick of steel-reinforced-concrete - had been drilled through. And beyond the drilling was the entrance to a tunnel. Incredibly, the tunnel stretched all the way under beneath Dom Manuel Avenue – a highly-trafficked road. How could no one have detected the digging? 

Authorities followed the tunnel, which led them to the landscaping business a block away. But it was already empty – and completely covered in white powder to prevent finger printing. They only had one name to go on, the supposed leaseholder, Paulo Sergio; but he seemed to have vanished without a trace. Maybe he was never real at all.

The plan worked perfectly. But the aftermath turned out to be a disaster. With such a large team necessary to pull off the job, many of the robbers couldn’t resist the chance to enjoy their wealth. One gang member bought ten brand new cars at once, just a week after the heist. Da Silva, the Big Digger, was caught with hordes of money on his person. Five other robbers were caught making suspiciously large purchases, like mansions and private planes. Police were scooping up more and more members of Ribeiro’s team. Did they feel invincible? Did they secretly want to get caught? Or did their discipline fail now that they weren’t under strict management anymore? 

As for Luis Fernando Ribeiro, he fled to São Paulo, where he hid undetected for two months. He spent his days sleeping and his nights partying. He had a lot worth celebrating – he had pulled off the second largest bank robbery in the world at the time. The only larger bank theft? The day before the U.S. invaded Iraq for the Second Gulf War in 2003, the dictator Saddam Hussein stole a billion dollars in cash from his own central bank.

The police may not have known Ribeiro’s name yet; but enough key figures in Brazil’s underworld certainly did. And they wanted a piece. 

Ribeiro was outside of a nightclub in São Paulo on October 7, 2005, when he was kidnapped. Within hours, his family received a threatening phone call, demanding a ransom of one million reis - nearly two hundred thousand dollars.

The family contacted their lawyer, Marcio Marcio. He assembled the cash and went, as instructed, to a dingy petrol station. The kidnappers were there waiting for him. They handed him a walkie-talkie and let him speak with a panicked Ribeiro. With proof that his client was still breathing, he handed over the money. The kidnappers fled, but there was no sign of their hostage. 

Ribeiro’s family was desperate. They contacted the police, and confessed that they believed his kidnapping was related to the heist. Police agreed that it was definitely because of the robbery. But they could not find any leads and, two weeks later, the body of Luis Fernando Ribeiro, second greatest bank robber in history, turned up on the side of a road hundreds of miles away. He had been shot seven times. 

Since the burglary, eight arrests have been made, far short of the dozens of employees Ribeiro assembled; and of the $70 million, only $8 million was ever recovered. Some of Ribeiro’s former team got back together for a sequel, targeting a Banco Central in São Paulo in 2011. This time, they dug a tunnel 2,000 feet in length, with a goal of stealing as much as $900 million. But they were caught before they completed the crime – many of them had been watched closely by the police ever since the heist in 2005. 

If Ribeiro’s ultimate goal were to escape a mean and doomed life in the favelas of Brazil; whether or not he achieved that goal depends on your point of view. Given the world he operated in, dying of old age was a long shot. I’m left wondering - what would he have done if he had grown up in a more stable community, received an education, had the opportunity to put his incredible skill and intelligence to work? We’ll never know, but even if he didn’t live to spend the money, even if his time on this Earth came to a cruel and brutal end; for one brief moment, he got to show the world his true potential.

Can you put a dollar value on that?

*** 

PART TWO

I mentioned that $70 million in cash weighed 3 ½ tons, and sat behind a foot of steel-reinforced concrete. To steal that was going to involve heavy labor in any scenario. But there are other ways of making a big criminal score, without tunneling, without a large team full of people who might give away the secret, and without even much risk of being shot.

So what’s the catch? The catch is you’ll never get to spend the wealth you steal. Welcome to the world of art thieves.

If you haven’t been paying attention, masterpieces of art have been getting much more expensive. In 2017, a painting by Leonardo da Vinci called Salvator Mundi was sold at an auction for over $450 million. Part of the reason prices climb so high is that it’s so rare for works of that status to be put on sale at all. There’s actually a law prohibiting the French government from ever selling the Mona Lisa, though an insurance assessment once put its value at somewhere between $660 and $850 million. There are even  rumors that the Mona Lisa you see at the Louvre is actually a fake or a forgery – it’s been stolen before.

So you can see the temptation. Let’s talk about the largest art theft in the history of the world. And we’ll take a guess at what might have motivated the thieves, but with one caveat – to this day, we’re not completely sure who the thieves were.

It all happened in the early hours of March 18, 1990, at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. The museum guards were Rick Abath and Randy Hestand. It was Hestand’s first night on the job. Abath was patrolling the halls when the building’s fire alarm sounded. He checked the fire alarm control panel, which reported smoke in multiple rooms of the museum. Figuring it was just a system malfunction, he shut off the alarm. 

At 1:20am, two people in police uniforms arrived at the museum’s side door. They told the guards they were responding to a disturbance call. The guards let them inside. As they passed front desk, where Abath was stationed, he noticed that one of the supposed “cops” was wearing a fake mustache. `

Caught, the thieves pounced on Abath, placing him in handcuffs. When Hestand arrived at the desk, they forced him into handcuffs as well. The guards were led to the basement, where they were tied to the furnace, their eyes and mouths duct taped shut. The thieves examined their wallets and noted their addresses, warning them not to tell the police a word. They promised the guards that, if they complied, they’d receive a reward in one year. 

Over the next 81 minutes, the thieves ransacked the museum. They smashed any alarms they came across, and made off with 13 pieces in total, including masterworks by Degas, Vermeer, and Rembrandt. The FBI estimated that the total value of those 13 paintings was a half a billion dollars.

A rigorous investigation began right away; and there was already a leading suspect - a notorious art thief by the name of John Tillman. Tilman had never stolen as a way to survive, and he kept stealing even after he had enough to retire on. For him, stealing gave him a sense of pride, of accomplishment, and of power.

Unlike the poverty and violence that Luis Fernando Ribeiro grew up in, John Tillman came from an affluent suburb of Halifax, Nova Scotia. According to an interview with CBC, he started stealing when he was just nine years old. He said he loved the feeling of carrying large amounts of cash in his pocket at school. He estimated that by the age of 12 he had collected one or two thousand dollars. He explained that it was, quote, 

“acquired through savings, wheeling, dealing, stealing. Whatever I had to do to get it.” 

By the time he was a teenager, he became interested in fine art, and he had already successfully robbed museums across Nova Scotia by the time he was 20. 

Tillman attended college at Mount Saint Vincent University and, like many college students, spent most of his time at the library. He wasn’t studying for finals, though. He was focused on something else - a passion project. Sitting on display in a locked glass bookcase was a rare, first-edition copy of Charles Darwin’s book On the Origin of Species – and Tillman was determined to take it. He hadn’t quite prepared himself for a job of that scale, though, and decided he needed more practice. Only years later, after successfully committing hundreds of other thefts, Tillman returned to his alma mater, and successfully stole Darwin’s most famous work, along with thirty other rare books in the university’s collection.

The book was worth hundreds of thousands; but Tillman knew he wouldn’t ever see that much on the black market. He settled for a shallow $31,000. It didn’t matter - to him, the thrill was the reward. Each heist was an intense, high-risk game. 

He referred to his robberies as “missions” as though he were starring in an action-packed heist movie. That idea isn’t much of a stretch. He was an expert manipulator and planner, often using elaborate disguises – including custom props and accessories – in order to get museum officials to trust him.  

On certain occasions, John Tillman even invited family members to join him. I guess he enjoyed the experience of stealing so much that he wanted to share it with the people closest to him. Later on, when he was asked about the theft of a 200-year-old watercolor from the Nova Scotia Legislature, Tillman recalled, quote, “this is one of my more favorite heists because it employed my mother, and it went very well. What we did is we dressed up as maintenance people on that thing with overalls, caps, names on our jackets, and we also had radios clipped on our belts. So, we had a van parked outside for the occasion and a telescopic ladder type device and we went in and we pretended to be maintenance people.” End quote.

He climbed the ladder and took the painting straight from the wall. Incredibly, Tillman was so convincing that a member of the provincial legislature held the door for him on the way out. He told CBC, quote “all ordinary people can be made to believe the most absurd of situations given the right props, the right confidence, the right look, the right acting.” End quote.

John Tillman took his operation around the world; and joining him to round out the team was his wife, a woman he’d met in Moscow named Katya Anastasia Zhestokova, along with her brother Vladimir. John, Katya, and Vladimir pulled off art heists across Europe, The Middle East, Africa, and South America. They had a well-practiced routine –Vladimir would hack into a museum’s security system and disable the alarms, Katya would cause a distraction, and Tillman would steal the art.

Tillman was known to law enforcement – he’d been arrested for making obscene telephone calls and threats, and was known for proclaiming his belief in White Nationalism, but he had yet to be convicted for any of these high-stakes burglaries. After completing literally hundreds, Tillman felt invincible; and, in his own words, “a little cocky.” His narcissistic tendencies, his belief in his own invincibility, meant that he couldn’t stand to have his brilliant achievements be secret forever. He would tell boastful stories about his heists to just about anyone who would listen.

In 2008, he actually invited a local Halifax magazine called Homes, Etc to feature his home in their home décor section – a home filled with stolen art and antiques! When asked by journalists if this invitation was him just asking to get caught, Tillman replied, quote “that was part of the thrill, part of the adrenaline rush that I would get - I would get an adrenaline rush, I’m not going to deny that.” End quote.

Finally, in January 2013, police officially raided his home. Inside, they found over 10,000 pieces of stolen art and artifacts. He had an absolute treasure trove; even including a letter written by George Washington priced at $1 million. It took police over three years to catalogue all the works they recovered. But those 13 paintings from Boston? They weren’t there. And he never mentioned them.

There are rumors that he had other stashes of stolen loot. But John Tillman died on December 23, 2018, without ever confirming if he had robbed the Gardner Museum. At the time of his death, he had been working on a deal to have a book and a movie made about his criminal career – an attention-seeker to the end.

Meanwhile, the police had another suspect in the case: a man named Bobby Donati.

Donati was a member of the Patriarca crime family – better known as the Boston mafia. Donati had conducted multiple art heists before the Gardner museum was robbed. The police had a theory that Donati may have stolen the art for a kind of ransom. He had a friend in prison, Myles J. Connor; and the police thought Donati might have stolen the works in order to exchange them for Connor’s early release.

In the year following the heist, friends reported that the usually outgoing Donati had become reserved and anxious, rarely leaving the house. He told people that he believed he was being followed. Then, on September 21, 1991, he was kidnapped. Three days later, his body was found in the trunk of a Cadillac – his throat slashed, and his head bashed in. He had been stabbed over 20 times.

This immediately takes me back to the kidnapping and gruesome murder of Luis Fernando Ribeiro. Whatever the circumstances that led to the killing of Donati, it was clear they were connected somehow to the life of crime and corruption he had been leading. But he, too, died without ever confessing any involvement in the Gardner Heist.

The Museum has offered a $10 million reward for information leading to the recovery of the 13 paintings. To this day, none have been recovered. 

Anthony Amore, director of security and chief investigator at the Gardner Museum, told reporters that his biggest fear is that the works are hiding in plain sight – that if you saw one outside a museum, you might not know how valuable it is. He says, quote, “I have this nightmare that some investigators over the 30-year period might have been doing a search in someone’s home somewhere – looking for drugs or money or guns. But they don’t know what these paintings look like,” end quote. 

Amore has reason to be afraid. Frenchman Stéphane Breitwieser stole 239 artworks between 1995 and 2001. When he was finally caught and arrested, his mother panicked. She wanted to protect her son. So she shredded as many paintings as she could get her hands on, shoving the fragments down the garbage disposal. One Swiss police officer remarked: “never have so many masters been destroyed at the same time.”

Who’s to say the 13 Gardner pieces didn’t suffer the same fate?  

It fascinates me that the two leading suspects in the Gardner Heist could have such wildly-differing motives – for one, it would have been about ego, and the thrill of danger. For the other, it would have been about power and leverage. And the estimated value of the paintings, five hundred million dollars, wasn’t the most important factor to either of them – that’s the most fascinating part of all. 

PART THREE 

As Luis Fernando Ribeiro knew, you can get your hands on untraceable cash, but it takes up a lot of space. As John Tillman could have told you, a painting can pack a lot of value into very little space, but it’s hard to sell it once you’ve stolen it; so it’s not a great way to make money. If you want something really portable, something you could fence for a lot of money, you want to follow the example of Italian con artist Leonardo Nortarbartolo. His specialty? Diamonds.

The world’s most valuable jewels and uncut gems are usually kept in vaults underneath the earth. They’re harder to get into than a bank vault, and the people who own them have more resources to hunt you down than the mob. The profits could be gigantic, but the challenges are greater than any we’ve talked about so far. To even plan a plausible jewel heist takes a true visionary, someone who combines the kind of audacity and genius that disrupts industries.

Let’s take a trip to the town of Antwerp, a beautiful city at the heart of the Flemish northern region of Belgium. It’s got a mild climate, a rich legacy of producing master painters like Rubens and Van Dyck, and the largest, richest, and most famous diamond district in the world. High-end jewelry shops, some of whom have been in business since the Middle Ages, stretch for over a mile through the city. 84% of the world’s rough-cut diamonds pass through Antwerp for cutting and polishing. That means that billions of dollars’ worth of diamonds move around this one mile area – and great measures are taken to protect them. Elaborate alarm systems, locks with over 100 million possible combinations, seismic sensors, infrared heat detectors. Break-ins should be impossible. 

But on the weekend of February 15th and 16th, 2003, Leonardo Nortarbartolo proved they are not. I don’t know what’s more remarkable – the scheme he pulled off; or the tiny, mundane, oh-so-human mistake that ruined it all.

Nortarbartolo committed his first robbery at the age of 8 – stealing jugs of milk from his neighborhood milkman. And from there, he never looked back. Like John Tillman, he was addicted to the rush that stealing gave him. He grew into an expert thief, and he escalated his targets from milk jugs, to cash, to diamonds. 

He often traveled from Italy to Antwerp, where he would pawn off diamonds he had stolen elsewhere. But seeing all the wealth in the diamond district, he fantasized about the ultimate jewel heist; and in 2003, he got to work making his dream a reality. 

Planning the heist took eighteen months. He assembled a gang of the best robbers he knew. They called themselves the School of Turin. They rented an office space for $700 month right in the heart of the diamond district. Nortarbolo posed as an Italian diamond merchant, and he impressed his neighbors with his expert knowledge of the jewels. His office rental included a very special perk – an ID card that granted him 24-hour entry to the office, as well as access to a safe deposit box in the vault under the building. 

The School of Turin thieves got to work, surveying the building, taking pictures of the inside of the vault, using cameras hidden inside pens. They even managed to install a hidden camera above the vault’s doors, which they used to observe the guards as they entered the vault door’s combination; and to study the shape of the vault key so they could make a duplicate. The camera’s signal couldn’t reach the surface, so they hid a sensor inside a fire extinguisher in a nearby storage room, and retrieved the footage from it regularly. 

The day before the heist, Nortarbartolo used his ID to enter the vault. He used hairspray to disrupt the thermal-motion sensors. The guards were right there and didn’t even notice. The sensors went offline for several hours, giving his team time to dismantle them later. 

The next day, Nortarbartolo waited in a getaway car, where he listened to a police scanner. Meanwhile, his gang – equipped with rubber gloves to avoid fingerprinting – picked the lock to an office building adjoining his. The two buildings were linked by a garden that did not have any cameras; so they could enter their own building without being seen. They used a ladder to climb onto a balcony in the garden; but this balcony was also monitored by an infrared sensor. The robbers blocked it with a homemade polyester shield, then disabled the alarms. They were in.

They covered the security cameras with black plastic bags. This allowed them to flip on the lights without the cameras noticing. The vault was protected by a magnetic lock armed with two plates. If opened, the magnetic field would be triggered, sounding the alarm. But the School of Turin was prepared. They attached a custom-made aluminum plate to the vault door, and used it to pivot the magnetic field out of the way. 

It was going almost too smoothly. They even found the original vault key inside a utility room, which made their carefully-crafted duplicate unnecessary.

Inside the vault, they turned off the lights to avoid triggering light sensors. One robber had memorized the exact number of steps from the vault door to its security panel; where he rerouted the electrical circuit, cutting off the sensors completely. And as an extra precaution, they used Styrofoam boxes and tape to block the heat and light sensors.

They drilled through the locks on every security box within the vault. Then they emptied the loot into duffel bags, and brought them out to Notarbartolo’s car. No alarms, no witnesses, no mistakes. Just diamonds, jewelry, gold, and silver. The merchants estimated the loss at over $100 million.

Their destination was France, where they intended to burn their plans and any other evidence. But here, is where the smallest, most human detail, that wasn’t a part of the master plan, sealed their fate. It was a long drive from Belgium to France, and the thieves had worked up an appetite. They stopped at a local grocery store for sandwiches before continuing the drive. But then, they became paranoid about carrying so much evidence with them across the border; so they changed plans, and discarded all the duffel bags of evidence in a cluster of trees on the side of the road. And they forgot that, inside one of the bags, was the receipt from the grocery trip. The police located the evidence the next day, and used security camera footage from the grocery store to track down the entire gang. 

The School of Turin was arrested just days later, but the majority of the loot was already transferred out of their hands. To this day, most of it still hasn’t been recovered. Leonardo Notarbartolo was found guilty of masterminding the heist and sentenced to 10 years in prison. He was released early in 2009 but returned to prison in 2013 for parole violations. He was finally released in 2017.

All that wealth, all the expertise and planning it took to get it, undone because of a sandwich. We’ve all been known to make bad decisions when we’re hungry, but I don’t think I’ve heard of a bigger blunder than this one.

Notarbartolo now claims that he was hired to do the job by a diamond merchant, that the value of the jewels he stole was wildly overinflated, and that it was all a scheme to commit insurance fraud. Does that explain the incredible good luck his team had right up to the moment they bought those sandwiches? Was he really just a contractor, putting his skills to work for someone else’s profit-making venture? The claim is dubious to say the least, but it’s interesting to me that at the moment when his name has become the most notorious, he no longer wants the credit. Maybe, for him, the challenge was everything.

***

PART FOUR 

Luis Ribeiro was dumped on the side of a road, his body filled with bullets. John Tillman’s high-flying, globe-trotting adventure ended with him dying alone after years in a prison cell. Leonardo Notarbartolo barely had a moment to celebrate his success before his diamond district apartment was traded for a cold, dark cage. 

Their heists practically stand as works of art in themselves – the product of intense discipline, creative thinking, and strokes of brilliance; they show a sort of daring that captivates, even inspires. Maybe in the middle of this, you’ve imagined yourself there –entering a forbidden vault, seeing riches beyond comprehension. Maybe it’s made your heart pound a little more. It has for me. 

But there’s always the aftermath. The paranoia. The punishment. The violence of the world you wanted to escape coming to claim you. It seems like the money is never the reward. 

It's striking to me that Ribeiro stole cash that was due to be incinerated, and that when you talk about painting and jewels, the whole concept of valuation for them is blatantly irrational and absurd. What does it even mean that a painting is "worth" $100 Million? It’s not like the artist or their family sees any of that money. And there’s a well-documented history of manipulation and artificial scarcity inflating the so-called "price" of diamonds. In a strange way, it feels like the targets of these heists contain some impulse to strike back against the hypocrisies of money; those instances where money, seemingly, is lying to us.

After that group of kids in Sao Paulo, Brazil, struck at me and tried to rob me; I went down the same dark path many do – the anger, the confusion, the fear and vulnerability. But as I considered the stories of these geniuses of crime and what drove them, my eyes opened to so much more – about the irrational ways we assign value to certain things, about how someone you least expect can demonstrate all the best qualities of entrepreneurship even in an illegal business, about how the cycles of poverty and lack of opportunity can lead people to choices some of us have never had to consider. 

I don’t hate those kids for what they did. But I’ve learned a few things about walking through marketplaces and protecting my wallet. And every so often, when I’m in a museum, I’ll look at a painting on the wall, and, I admit, get a little thrill by asking myself – “what if?”

***

Thank you for listening to My Dark Path. I’m MF Thomas, creator and host, and I produce the show with the indispensable Emily Wolfe. This story was prepared for us by Laura Townsend. Our senior story editor is Nicholas Thurkettle and our lead researcher is Alex Bagosy; big thank yous to them and the entire My Dark Path team.

Please take a moment and give My Dark Path a 5-star rating wherever you’re listening. Lastly, thank you for listening.  You have more choices than ever about where to spend your time. I’m grateful that you’ve chosen to spend some time here, with me, walking my Dark Path together. And don’t hesitate to reach out via email – explore@mydarkpath.com. I’d love to hear from you. I really would!

Again, thanks for walking the dark paths of history, science and the paranormal with me, your host, MF Thomas. Until next time, good night.