Antwerp diamond heist evidence

Over the weekend of 15–16 February 2003, at the Antwerp Diamond Centre in the city's diamond quarter. Tenants discovered emptied safe-deposit boxes when business resumed. Belgian police opened the investigation that week.

Contemporary reports and later English books used a figure on the order of $100 million in diamonds, jewellery, gold and cash. Because many tenants used the vault, there is no single audited public inventory. The number is a 2003-scale estimate, not a courtroom exhibit total.

Leonardo Notarbartolo, who rented space in the building, was the best-known defendant and served a Belgian sentence. Associates later grouped in English as the School of Turin were convicted in person or in absentia. Convictions did not include recovery of most of the goods.

Most were not. A discarded cache of papers and tape near Brussels helped investigators, but it was not the haul. Loose stones are hard to identify once recut or resold. The recovery column remains the open half of a mixed case.

An English-language nickname, popularised after the fact, for the Italian group around Notarbartolo. It is not an official Belgian court title. The phrase signals a crew from the Turin area, not a licensed school.

No. The Diamond Centre held many tenants' boxes. English headlines sometimes blurred the building with the wider Antwerp trade or with De Beers. The public record is a multi-tenant vault in the diamond quarter.