Flawless
Inside the Largest Diamond Heist in History

Scott Andrew Selby and Greg Campbell, author of Blood Diamonds

On February 15, 2003, a group of thieves broke into an allegedly airtight vault in the international diamond capital of Antwerp, Belgium and made off with over $108 million dollars worth of diamonds and other valuables. They did so without tripping an alarm or injuring a single guard in the process.

Although the crime was perfect, the getaway was not. The police zeroed in on a band of professional thieves fronted by Leonardo Notarbartolo, a dapper Italian who had rented an office in the Diamond Center and clandestinely cased its vault for over two years.  The “who” of the crime had been answered, but the “how” remained largely a mystery.

Enter Scott Andrew Selby, a Harvard Law grad and diamond expert, and Greg Campbell, author of Blood Diamonds, who undertook a global goose chase to uncover the true story behind the daring heist. Tracking the threads of the story throughout Europe—from Belgium to Italy, in seedy cafés and sleek diamond offices—the authors sorted through an array of conflicting details, divergent opinions and incongruous theories to put together the puzzle of what actually happened that Valentine’s Day weekend.

This real-life Ocean’s Eleven—a combination of diamond history, journalistic reportage, and riveting true-crime story—provides a thrilling in-depth study detailing the better-than-fiction heist of the century.

Scott Andrew Selby is a graduate of UC Berkeley, Harvard Law School, and Sweden’s Lund University, where he wrote his master’s thesis on diamonds. He is licensed to practice law in California and New York.

Greg Campbell is an award-winning journalist and the author of Blood Diamonds: Tracing the Deadly Path of the World’s Most Precious Stones and The Road to Kosovo: A Balkan Diary. His work has appeared in the Economist, the Wall Street Journal Magazine, the Christian Science Monitor, and the San Francisco Chronicle, among others.