Flawless Page 11
When on occasion he stayed later than 7:00 p.m., which was allowed for tenants working in their offices without need to access the vault, Notarbartolo found that the main corridor on the ground floor was already dark by the time he left for the night. The control booth was unmanned and locked; the building’s video cameras were dutifully recording all the areas they covered, but no one was watching the images. To exit after hours, he used his badge to open a door near the elevators that led to a short corridor cluttered with garbage cans and bits of loose lumber. The corridor led to the parking garage. He noted that tenants were required to use doors that were badge controlled to come and go from the garage, but that there was also another door connecting the garage to C Block that was locked with a key. Entering or leaving through that door, if a key could be fabricated, wouldn’t leave an electronic trail, as would the doors that opened only with a badge.
Because the garage doors facing Lange Herentalsestraat were closed after hours, late-working tenants were supposed to call the concierge to open the door for them. Notarbartolo, however, found he could open the garage door without the help of the concierge: a key was left permanently inserted in the manual door opener on the wall. One twist to the right opened the door; one twist back to the left and the door closed. Notarbartolo found that to exit the garage unaided he needed only give himself enough clearance, then turn the key to the left and hustle through the opening as the door began to roll back down.
The intelligence gleaned from these late nights at the office might not have seemed like much to those who weren’t professional thieves. But in the hands of a master like Notarbartolo, these small tidbits were invaluable.
It’s been said that there are as many cafés in Turin as there are Catholics, and it isn’t hard to believe. Turin’s storied cafés have always been important meeting places for people with big ideas. Whether they were planning a revolution or debating the merits of Torino FC over Juventus, men have made their arguments in cafés, as the constant influx of traffic makes the perfect front for anonymity. Historically, these places have served as petri dishes for all sorts of sordid plots and plans, and they have also been good for recruitment. In fact, Count Camillo Benso di Cavour, who masterminded Italian unification after Napoleon Bonaparte exiled the Savoys, did so from the cafés around the palazzo that bears his family’s name.
The cafés throughout the Quadrilatero Romano in the old city are like miniature wedding cakes: no matter how small they are, every inch is well tended and tastefully decorated, chock full of coffees, teas, wines, liquors, chocolates, and pastries. One can usually find the owner himself polishing the brass filigree or waxing the marble countertop until it is as reflective as the surface of a lake. For customers, standing at the counter to sip their espresso is de rigueur, but also practical; if there are tables at all in the smaller cafés, there are usually no more than two or three, and those are almost always occupied.
Farther from the city’s center, café culture becomes no less important, but the cafés themselves take on more of a workaday nature. The farther you get from the historic churches and cobbled streets, the more likely you are to take your coffee in a rundown little storefront. That was the case with the café near Fontanella’s locksmith business and several of the cafés within paces of Notarbartolo’s jewelry stores. While investigators believe the big meetings took place at Notarbartolo’s house, the passing of smaller bits of information and intelligence undoubtedly happened over a thimbleful of espresso and a plate of cannoli amid the din of the lunch crowds. Had any of them been under surveillance, the police would have seen nothing criminal, or even odd, about two or three of them meeting for thirty minutes of drinking and conversation once every three or four weeks.
It may have been in one of these little cafés where Notarbartolo shared the good news with the others: Yes, there were active video cameras recording what happened everywhere they needed to go, but what had become obvious during Notarbartolo’s observations at closing time was that no one watched the monitors overnight. With no one watching them, the video cameras were as good as blind. The recordings were for watching later, only after a catastrophe struck. Videotapes were stored for a few weeks and not viewed unless something happened, which it hadn’t the entire time Notarbartolo was there. Removing evidence of their crime would be as easy as breaking into the control booth and stealing the tapes that recorded the break-in. Best yet, the guards clearly marked the videotapes with the month and day—rather than a code—so it would be simple to steal the correct ones.
Notarbartolo also told his colleagues the stunning ease with which someone inside the Diamond Center could open the door to the garage. Opening it from the outside would be trickier, but they had an idea of how it could be done. Based on Notarbartolo’s description of the garage door opener and the secret films he had made of what could be seen of the mechanism inside the garage, it was likely that the opener was as old as the building itself. If it was true, then that meant the garage doors operated on one of 1,024 radio frequencies that were preprogrammed into the circuitry on a series of twelve toggle switches. They could simply use an electronic scanner to run through all the possible frequencies to find the right one. It would take, at most, thirty minutes. Once they knew the frequency, they could make their own remote control using an RF transmitter and circuit boards they could buy at any hobby store or electronics retailer.
Although they were closer by half to the police kiosk than the main doors on Schupstraat, the garage doors were not in the officers’ line of sight. The Diamond Center had cameras monitoring the garage doors, but they broadcast their images inside the building, not to the police. He’d studied the street intensively for signs of other businesses’ cameras that might cover the garage doors, but he’d seen none. The offices facing C Block across Lange Herentalsestraat didn’t have external cameras that covered the Diamond Center’s garage entrance, with the exception of a nearby gold company.
If the sound of the garage doors opening and closing was overheard by the police inside the kiosk on Schupstraat, it wouldn’t arouse undue suspicion. It was not uncommon for the concierges to open the garage at night to let in those who needed to work after regular business hours.
Entering through the garage clearly beat the front door. The rolling gate covering the front door was locked from the inside. Even if they could have found a way through it, it was in full view of the police’s video cameras which, unlike the Diamond Center’s, were actually being watched live. Additionally, the front door was within sight of the police kiosk on Schupstraat, which was manned around the clock. And if that weren’t daunting enough, it would have been impossible to bring a getaway vehicle around to the front.
The first step of their infiltration began to take mental shape: Three or four darkly dressed men could blend into the shadows as they walked single-file toward the garage doors from Lange Herentalsestraat. Once they were a few paces away, they would trigger the door with their homemade remote and slip inside. It would take mere seconds for all of them to be safely inside and they would immediately click the remote again to roll the door shut. Once inside, they would have virtual run of the place.
The thieves’ daydreams of getting this far relied on a whole chain of what-ifs clicking as perfectly into place as the combination on the vault door. Their plan assumed they could learn the frequency of the garage door opener with an electronic scanner, which would require someone to loiter nearby for up to thirty minutes while fiddling with a suspicious-looking mechanism, and then trigger it a few times to be sure it worked properly. That was also assuming the building hadn’t upgraded to a more difficult-to-crack rolling-frequency transmitter, which automatically changed the code after every use. It assumed that the police wouldn’t be suspicious of the sight and sound of a garage door opening in the middle of the night. It assumed that a passerby wouldn’t happen upon them and question their activities. It counted on the concierge staying in his apartment, preferably sound asleep.
> There were a score of unknown elements as well. As far as they could tell from Notarbartolo’s reconnaissance, there were no alarms on the door to C Block from the garage—the one that required a key that the School of Turin’s locksmiths would fabricate—or any motion detectors in the hallways. But there was always the chance that there was some alarm or sensor he’d overlooked.
And, although they felt it was a safe assumption that the concierge on duty would stay in his apartment, there was also the chance that he had some sort of after-hours ritual Notarbartolo didn’t know about. For all they knew, the men liked to roller skate through the empty hallways before turning in for the night. Even if the concierges didn’t roam the halls as part of their nightly routines, there was the possibility that they would be called to open the garage for a late-working tenant, introducing yet more people into the building’s corridors and stairwells. It was all a game of chance.
Ironically, the safest place for the thieves would be on the vault level. With the magnetic alarm engaged on the vault door, there would be no reason at all for a tenant or the concierge to descend to the basement, no matter what the emergency. The concierges knew that opening the door at any time other than 7:00 a.m. on a weekday would send an alert to Securilink, the company that monitored the alarm, who would then call the police on the assumption that the concierge was being forced to open the vault. The tenant who left his passport in his safe deposit box prior to a weekend trip was simply out of luck; he’d have to wait until the start of the workweek before the vault would open again. For the School of Turin, it meant that there would be no traffic on the vault level from 7:00 p.m. every Friday to 7:00 a.m. the following Monday. They had a window of sixty hours.
The slow pace and tedium of planning a heist is something most Hollywood movies rarely depict. Heist films never show the frustration of needing to wait a month or more to get a critical piece of information from the inside man, such as confirmation on the number of security guards who work during the day. They don’t show the gnawing fear that something is being overlooked, or that their ideas might not work. And they don’t show the interminable hours staring at blueprints and watching videotapes over and over and drawing a blank.
If the men in the School of Turin watched such films, they likely would have gotten a laugh out of what they all seem to have in common: heists that are complicated to the point of absurdity and which leave far too much to chance.
To gain access to the underground vault of the Bellagio hotel in Las Vegas, the Ocean’s Eleven crew had to first steal a high-tech magnetic superconductor from a scientific installation to kill the power to the entire city. In the original version of The Italian Job (which, incidentally, took place in Turin), Michael Caine’s gang snuck into the city’s traffic control facility to take over the computer system that controlled the stoplights, then stole a load of gold once its delivery truck got mired in immobile traffic. The gang then escaped through an entirely implausible route in Mini Coopers. In The Score, Robert De Niro’s plan to steal a priceless French scepter from a safe in the basement of the Montreal Customs House relied on his accomplice—a man he didn’t know well or trust—hacking into the security network using a laptop. A lynchpin of the plan was De Niro’s ability to crack the safe in less than fifteen minutes.
Another hallmark of these fictional jobs is that they take only a few weeks to plan and pull off. By the time the School of Turin was ready to rob the Diamond Center, Notarbartolo would have spent twenty-seven months on his surveillance mission. And in the movies there is usually some sort of devious double-cross, pulled at the height of the crime, but which the hero invariably has the foresight to predict and thwart.
The School of Turin knew that real-life jobs were hard enough without the added drama of split-second timing, complicated disguises, and interpersonal subterfuge. And they knew that at the heart of every successful heist was a near-religious devotion to research.
Figuring out how to get into the Diamond Center was relatively easy compared to what they faced once they did. Once inside, they had to contend with a series of locked doors between them and the loot, most dauntingly the silent, immobile sentinel whose sole purpose was to keep men like them out of the safe room: the LIPS door. If they were able to open it without setting off any of the several alarms monitoring the vault, they’d have to figure out how to gain entry to the nearly two hundred locked safe deposit boxes that contained what they hoped to steal.
So far, no one had any idea how to do it without getting caught.
The vault door in the Diamond Center was an elegantly designed masterpiece of engineering. Its locks incorporated the most basic principles of physical safeguards as well as a number of ingenious countermeasures that were in place to prevent those safeguards from being subverted.
The schematics for the vault door and its inner workings are available from a number of sources, most notably from old locksmith manuals that legitimate safecrackers keep on hand in the same way auto mechanics keep repair books for old or rare engines. The School of Turin could also have ordered them from the manufacturer, which likely wouldn’t have hesitated to provide them to a legitimate locksmith outfit like Fontanella’s Personal Chiavi. But if obtaining the plans would be simple, figuring out a way to actually open the door would not.
From the plans, the thieves would have seen that the combination dial was connected to a long rod that operated a drive cam inside the door. The drive cam was connected to a stack of four round wheel plates, each with a notch in it. Each of the wheels corresponded with a number on the dial. As the correct numbers were dialed, the cam “picked up” a different wheel with the notches aligned and spun them in tandem. Once all four were lined up, it allowed a “fence,” or metal bar, to fall into the notches and out of the way of the key mechanism. Now the key could be inserted and turned to retract the bolts that anchored the door to the jamb. Without the right combination, the key could not be turned.
The key itself, which was assembled from the pipe and the removable stamp, operated a sturdy lock. The double-bitted stamp aligned with grooves and wards cut into a stack of sixteen steel plates. The lock was designed to be unpickable.
Without knowing the combination, a safecracker would have quite a time opening the door, even if he had the key. It could, nevertheless, be done. The first step would be to discover the combination. One way of doing that would be to drill a peephole into the door so that the safecracker could use a special eyepiece called a borescope to see the notches on the wheels. Doing so would require the safecracker to be intimately familiar with the door; he would need to drill the precise distance needed to view the wheels and no farther. If he were to accidentally drill into the wheels themselves, it could warp them and prevent them from turning properly. If he drilled the hole to the precise depth, then it would be just a matter of watching through the borescope while turning the dial back and forth until the notches lined up.
Drilling the hole, however, would not be nearly as easy as it sounds. The vault door was made of steel, and, depending on the model, backed by ultra-hard metal plates made of tungsten carbide or aluminum oxide around the combination mechanism. The LIPS company called them “torch and drill resistant layers,” or TDRs. Titanium- or diamond-tipped drill bits could eventually bore through these plates, but doing so would burn through several drills; the bits would outlast the motors. Drilling even a small hole would take days.
The School of Turin couldn’t afford to spend a day or more drilling through the vault door. In fact, they couldn’t spend any time at all drilling, as the vault was equipped with seismic alarms. These sophisticated detectors intended to sense vibrations in the physical fabric of a building or room are designed to recognize the unique repetitive vibrations of drilling, sawing, and hammering but can be programmed to ignore other frequencies like those produced by slamming doors or the passing rumble of a dump truck. But even if there hadn’t been any such sensors, drilling presented the danger of creating enough noise th
at a concierge could hear it if they were unlucky.
It was possible to learn the combination without drilling, but it would probably take just as long. The stereotypical image depicted in the movies of a safecracker using a stethoscope to hear tiny clicks and clacks is not far from reality. What he’s listening for are the telltale sounds of the fence making contact with the edges of the notches in the wheels as they rotate. Unlike in the movies, however, this isn’t done in minutes. The safecracker uses a graph to plot the “locations” of the clicks on the dial for each wheel, eventually coming up with the numbers that correspond with them. Then it’s a matter of trying every combination of those four numbers until the door opens. While it might be the most elegant way to crack a safe, it’s also the most difficult, with a high probability of failure.
Automatic safe dialers are available to do this job with the aid of computers—a robotic hand can be connected to the wheel to quickly dial through the combination possibilities—but they aren’t significantly quicker than a human safecracker spending days with his ear pressed to the door. In fact, the automatic dialing method can likely take days, if not weeks.
The last hurdle posed by the door was its magnetic alarm. The magnets—one bolted to the outside of the door, the other to the jamb—were the size of bricks. When the door was closed, they lined up side by side and created a magnetic field between them. A ten-digit keypad on the wall armed and disarmed the alarm (along with all the other sensors in the room), and the cables connecting the contraption to Securilink were housed in a flexible steel tube that snaked into the ceiling. The control mechanisms were tamperproof; if the alarms were turned off with the keypad, or if the cables were severed with a power saw, the security company would know it.
The thieves could bypass the magnetic alarm, in theory, if they used a plasma cutting torch or thermal lance to cut a man-sized hole in the door itself, leaving the alarm attached and intact. A plasma torch is like a gas welder, but far more powerful, capable of cutting steel like butter. But since they would have to cut entirely through the door, the shower of sparks that would arc into the safe room would set off the motion detector, the light detector, and the heat detector.