But why was this Diamond Heist Just Nearly Perfect?
However, unscrupulous jewelers can’t steal anywhere near the number of diamonds as those working in the actual diamond mines. As they pull diamonds from the churned-up seabed gravel, they check to see if guards are watching, and if not, they slip one or two under their fingernails. One thief in Namaqualand was caught when a guard spotted a homing pigeon trying unsuccessfully to take off. According to reporting by The Atlantic, all along the South African coast, workers regularly walk off with millions of dollars in rough (uncut) stones. Later, when it’s safe, they swallow them, insert them into an orifice or load them onto homing pigeons.
First, diamonds are uniquely identifiable. The recovery network is huge. Insurance – you could look here – companies stand to lose millions of dollars when a diamond is never found, and everyone’s premiums go up as a result. Plus, jewelers rely on their name to make the big sales. Second, it’s in almost everyone’s best interest to recover a stolen gem. The latter is easy to understand in terms of insurance. It costs an absolute fortune to insure diamonds. Trust is essential in the business. If a jeweler receives a stolen diamond and gets a bad reputation in the industry, their sales will suffer.
But the perfect crime often falls to pieces when thieves try to unload their stolen gems. When one of the thieves tried to sell her 33-carat diamond, the FBI knew about it immediately. In 1959, the FBI didn’t just recover Vera Krupp’s huge, recognizable center stone, they also recovered the small side stones. There’s a network that traces the buying and selling of diamonds – especially cut stones – around the world. Diamonds aren’t easy to sell – even when you actually own them. That’s how the not-so-graceful robbery of Vera Krupp’s diamond theft in 1959 ended.
It’s an impressive heist, no doubt. Antwerp even has special police patrolling the diamond center. For the same reason, diamonds are protected by the best security systems available: infrared sensors, “unbreakable” safes, guards with guns and phones with direct lines to the police when they’re lifted off the receivers. So what can top a $100 million diamond theft that bypassed one of the world’s most comprehensive security systems and took two years of meticulous planning? One that didn’t even bypass security at all. Diamond heists happen at least every few years. After all, diamonds are small, lightweight and valuable.
If your ring is stolen and it turns up at a jewelry store, this certification tells police whose diamond it is. Even when no one calls the police, and a diamond thief is successful in selling the gems, it’s seldom much of a success. An Oxford researcher has been working on a way to engrave inside the diamond instead. While one must assume that some big-time thieves have black market connections that will let them sell a huge diamond for huge payback, most thieves must settle for the small-time fences (receivers of stolen goods) that pay nowhere near what a diamond is really worth. However, identifying numbers can be removed when a diamond is cut and polished. Reducing their size lowers their value, but it’s a way for thieves to keep them from being identified.
So, what’s the most unbelievable diamond heist on the record books? Real-world diamond heists are surprisingly like the heists we see in the movies. Probably the one in which the thief charmed his way into the safe. The Antwerp Diamond Center building vault includes 160 safe deposit boxes in which diamond brokers leave their stones. And they’re not nearly as rare as you might think. The largest diamond heist ever occurred in Antwerp, Belgium, one of the world’s diamond capitals. In February 2003, 123 of those boxes were emptied of their contents by four people who had been planning the theft for at least two years.
