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Quick answers
When did the Antwerp diamond heist happen?
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.
How much was taken?
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.
Who was convicted?
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.
Were the diamonds recovered?
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.
What is the School of Turin?
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.
Was this the De Beers vault?
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.
The story is a weekend absence in a famous trading street, followed by a rubbish-bag lead and an Antwerp trial.
What it is not is a lesson in vaults. The public record is inventory shock, names in court and a recovery failure.
Beats
- A building full of other people's boxes
The Diamond Centre sat inside Antwerp's diamond quarter, where small firms store stock in shared strong rooms. The 2003 loss was many tenants' property, not one crown jewel.
- A February weekend
When the building reopened after 15–16 February, boxes were empty. Police treated the vault as a crime scene and began listing what tenants said they had lost.
- A dump in the Brussels woods
Discarded papers and tape near the Forêt de Soignes gave investigators a path to a tenant, Leonardo Notarbartolo, rather than a confession beside the boxes.
- Antwerp names the crew
Trials in Belgium convicted Notarbartolo and associates later tagged in English as the School of Turin. Sentences were real. The stones were not in the dock.
- Interviews after prison
Later magazine and book interviews reopened arguments about scale and blame. They did not produce a public restitution of the 2003 estimate.
Antwerp 2003 ends as a mixed dossier: court names on one side, an unidentified river of stones on the other.
Public-record encyclopedia. Not legal advice. Not a how-to. Graphic detail is withheld. Wars belong in a separate atlas.