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time as they struggled to ensure Turin never got as bad a reputation as Naples or Palermo, the gang of jewel thieves was able to operate just outside of the police’s grasp. And so, for over a decade, the bandits looted Turin’s jewelry stores in a citywide spree that the cops seemed powerless to stop.
    It was a particularly frustrating crime wave because the thieves were unusually clever and elusive. Martino knew who most of them were, but due to their singular skill in pulling off the heists, they got away with their crimes more often than they were caught and punished for them. Those arrested were usually out on the streets within a few years at most. Smart criminals employed smart lawyers.
    Martino was a very disciplined detective, and he knew that patience was his ally in building a case against the likes of Notarbartolo and his associates. The more they operated, the more likely they were to slip up and get caught with their hands in a big enough cookie jar that they would do real time. But Martino was also human, and it frustrated him that the criminals’ time had not yet come.
    The jewelry heists had tapered off in the late 1990s. Martino knew the thieves’ modus operandi well enough that this hiatus didn’t signal retirement. It just meant that they were onto another score and were busy plotting its details. If anyone at the Diamond Center had called as he was turning these thoughts over in his mind, Martino would have seen the picture immediately.
    But no one did.

    To understand how Turin produced thieves of Notarbartolo’s caliber, it is important first to understand the city itself.
    Turin is ancient, dating back to before the time of Hannibal, the Carthaginian general who marched his army over the French Alps from Iberia at the beginning of the Second Punic War in the third century BCE. Descending from the Alpine foothills leading from France into Italy, Hannibal discovered the Taurini tribe living in a valley formed by four rivers: the Po, Dora Riparia, Stura di Lanzo, and Sangone. The people who then lived in the area that would be Turin did not survive their encounter with the famous general.
    The conquerors settled into the verdant and temperate northwestern Italian Piedmont, a natural gateway between the larger European continent and the Mediterranean Italian peninsula. The area’s strategic importance to invading armies was such that military leaders were compelled to stop and pay proper homage to Turin’s rulers. To pass through the city en route to battlefields in France, Switzerland, or elsewhere in Italy required the permission of local leaders.
    In the first century BCE, Julius Caesar established a fort near the Po River and granted Roman citizenship to those living nearby. Portions of the ancient twenty-four-foot-high brick walls Caesar erected around the small city still stand. So too does the Roman Quarter, the Quadrilatero Romano, where the ancient Roman buildings now house trendy restaurants, cafés, and fashion retailers.
    The Savoy dynasty left its own impact on the city when it ruled a shifting area that included parts of present-day Italy and France from palaces in Turin. As the center of its empire, Turin enjoyed lavish architectural and cultural attention from the Savoys, whose artists filled its streets with stunning Baroque buildings, piazze as wide as airport runways, and public works of art. The grand and opulent royal palaces, residences, churches, and government buildings survived invasion by the French, occupation by Napoleon, and Allied bombing strikes during World War II.
    Most of those structures also survived the rise and fall of industrialization. Turin’s claim to economic fame was the Fiat automobile company, which was founded in 1899. It provided Turin with its economic heart, attracting waves of poor and largely uneducated Italians who migrated north in search of a better life. In Turin, industries like Fiat promised work and stability. By 1951, some four hundred