Thieves beat infrared sensors, Doppler radar, and a magnetic alarm to crack a vault two floors underground — then got caught because of a half-eaten salami sandwich.
Over the weekend of February 15-16, 2003, a gang led by Leonardo Notarbartolo stole more than $100 million in diamonds, gold, and jewelry from a vault beneath the Antwerp Diamond Center, in the middle of the world's most heavily guarded diamond district.
The vault sat two floors underground and was protected by an advanced combination lock, infrared heat detectors, a seismic sensor, Doppler radar, and a magnetic field alarm system, considered one of the most secure private vaults in the world.
Notarbartolo spent over two years preparing, renting an office in the building itself to gain legitimate access and quietly casing the vault's defenses from the inside.
The gang defeated the heat sensor by spraying it with ordinary hairspray to temporarily blind it, and neutralized the magnetic alarm by carefully loosening the screws on its detector plates and holding them in place with tape and a custom aluminum plate during the break-in.
Once inside, they used a hand-cranked device to force open 109 of the vault's 189 safe deposit boxes, each secured with both a physical key and a combination lock.
The heist unraveled almost by accident: an amateur, gang member dumped garbage from their hideout near a motorway, and a landowner who found it tipped off police, leading investigators to DNA evidence on a half-eaten salami sandwich.
Notarbartolo was arrested just five days later when he returned to the Diamond Center building, and was ultimately sentenced to 10 years in prison; three accomplices received five years each.
Despite the arrests, the vast majority of the stolen diamonds were never recovered, and Notarbartolo later claimed in a Wired interview that the heist was actually an insurance scam orchestrated by an unnamed diamond merchant, though investigators found his account implausible.
The robbery, dubbed the 'heist of the century,' became the subject of the book Flawless and the 2025 Netflix documentary Stolen: Heist of the Century.