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    Returning to his office, Notarbartolo transcribed his mental notes. Although his safe deposit box had been empty, it did contain one thing of immense value: a clue as to how it might be opened without a key or a combination. Notarbartolo hurriedly worked to capture everything while it was fresh in his mind. After he’d emptied his brain, he shuffled again through the pages and considered his mission. It was daunting.
    Among the long list of security measures he would have to overcome, there was one glimmer of good news. Despite fortifications that would have made most thieves give up before they even began, the Diamond Center had a glaring weakness that a criminal as experienced as Notarbartolo would most certainly have noticed right away. Though most of the building was within the SADA, surrounded by the cocoon of cameras, cops, and ram-proof vehicle barriers, not all of it was.
    The garage doors of C Block opened directly onto Lange Herentalsestraat, outside the security zone. There were cameras on that street, of course, and the police substation was close to the garage doors. The thieves would still have to dodge video surveillance; sidestep police patrols; enter the locked building without being detected; somehow penetrate the LIPS door without setting off the alarm; bypass motion detectors, infrared detectors, and light detectors; crack nearly two hundred locked safes and make off with as much loot as could be carried, all without alerting the onsite caretakers or being given away by a battery of closed-circuit TV cameras. But this major security hole might just be the key to pulling off the heist.
    With the first stage of his reconnaissance mission complete, it was time for Notarbartolo to return to Italy, where his team of expert lock pickers, safecrackers, and alarm specialists awaited their briefing.

Chapter Two
    THE SCHOOL OF TURIN
“This is the city of Turin, the industrial capital of Italy. The most modern in Europe, famed for its architecture and soon, I trust, for the greatest robbery of the twentieth century.”
— The Italian Job (1969)

    If anyone at the Diamond Center had called the Italian police to check on their new tenant, they would have eventually been transferred to Marco Martino. And if they’d ask him if he’d ever heard of a Turin resident named Leonardo Notarbartolo, it would have been like asking the Catholic police commander if he attended Mass regularly.
    “Of course,” Martino would have said, followed quickly by, “Why do you ask?”
    Such a phone call never happened, but if it had, it may well have stopped the plot to rob the Diamond Center in its tracks. Martino would have pulled out the thick salmon-colored file folder with Notarbartolo’s name emblazoned on it that he kept near at hand. The file was filled with details of the jeweler’s criminal life that would have been more than the Diamond Center needed to know.
    Martino’s official title was Lieutenant Colonel Adjutant of the Questora di Torino, Squadra Mobile. In short, he was the commander of the police department’s Mobile Squadron, a specially trained unit of police detectives who tackled vice, corruption, and organized crime in Turin.
    The names of Notarbartolo and his associates were well known on the third floor of the medieval-looking police department. The dense and bustling city of Turin was known for many things—its world-class art and architecture, the holy shroud believed by many to be Christ’s burial cloth, the area’s checkered history as an automotive manufacturing center—but Martino and his team focused on an aspect of the city that rarely made the tourist guidebooks: its unique criminal element.
    In terms of its underworld, Turin had two major distinctions: it was an organized-crime stronghold bitterly fought over in the 1980s and 1990s by warring Mafia clans and it was also home to the most successful band of jewelry thieves in the world. Because Mafia crimes dominated the detectives’