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.