And spit on the law: confessions of a robber who opened the World Diamond Center
In 2003, Italian Leonardo Notarbartolo almost pulled off the heist of the century by targeting the Antwerp World Diamond Center, but fell for a ridiculous mistake. In 2023, his story — lyrical and at the same time fascinating — formed the basis of the TV series "Everyone Loves Diamonds." Critic Lidia Maslova presents the book of the week specifically for Izvestia.
Leonardo Notarbartolo
"It's impossible to steal: How I robbed the most reliable diamond vault"
Moscow : Alpina Publisher, 2025. —trans. from Italian. By Andrey Manukhin] — 320 p.
On the title page of the book "It is impossible to Steal", it is reported with restrained pride that the story of Leonardo Notarbartolo, who robbed the Antwerp World Diamond Center with his gang on the night of February 16, 2003, inspired the creators of the Italian TV series "Everyone loves Diamonds", released the year before last. For the Russian reader, Notarbartolo's memoirs will surely evoke another funny cinematic, or rather animated, association: in their sincere boastful intonation, and in general, in the plot, "It's impossible to Steal" is very reminiscent of the famous gangster song from the animated film "The Adventures of Captain Vrungel." You can compare it almost verbatim, say, to a line from a song.: "Banco tresto presidento is robbed un momento, oh yes, / And for this, the director made us into a movie, oh yes!" is quite equivalent to the book phrase: "What you saw in Hollywood blockbusters starring Brad Pitt or George Clooney, on Amazon or Netflix, I pulled off in real life." And sometimes Notarbartolo admits that he feels like "the main character of a comic book.": This robbery is an idea so unrealistic and ambitious that sometimes it feels like I'm just dreaming about it."
However, Notarbartolo's bandit-gangster song turned out to be much longer, in some places rather heartbreaking and rather sadly philosophical than recklessly careless. The fact is that the author of the book still failed to realize the line "we hold the bank of millions", because the police quickly got on his trail due to a ridiculous comic mistake that prevented him from destroying evidence as masterfully as he came up with the details of the robbery. When you read how stupidly Notarbartolo made a mistake, even when he and his accomplices had mountains of Antwerp diamonds in their pockets, you remember the simple-minded robber Mario from another classic Soviet cartoon "Robbery by ...", shot by Yefim Hamburg in 1978. "At that blue time" (as Ostap Bender would say), 26-year—old Leonardo had just come out after his first six-year prison sentence, after an older friend who admired his "banality" of judgment dragged the young man into robbing a jewelry store under the pretext of a desperate life situation, and a couple of years later turned Leonardo in. (who didn't take any of the loot) to the police: an unusual friend turned out to be an original in everything.
In prison, Notarbartolo wasted no time and became addicted to reading, and he treated this process with the same Sicilian emotionality and fervent imagination with which he approaches everything. For example, he not only studied the works of Leonardo da Vinci, but even imagined that his namesake was sitting in the same cell with him.: "I wish I could meet someone like that," I think, and then I realize that he shares a cell with me in a certain sense. In general, the company was quite good: somewhere in the next cell, Fyodor Dostoevsky was serving his sentence ("I like to randomly read a page or two of some Russian writer. Dostoevsky's "Idiot" resembles a textbook on mechanics: it explains how radiators and pulleys of the soul are assembled"), as well as the author of "Man without Properties" Robert Musil: "I am especially touched by the part where Moosbrugger, sitting in prison, tries to understand what law is, because his whole life was a struggle. for their own rights. And now I feel that Musil is also next to me, literally in the next cell."
A little later, Notarbartolo also dreams of sitting with Bertolt Brecht, in a broader sense of the word: "I would like to sit with this Brecht, have a cup of coffee and chat about this and about everything else. Some books are a much better company than thousands of hypocrites."
So, slowly communicating with his virtual "cellmates" from among the writers, Notarbartolo forms a whole philosophy of theft, according to which, if not everything, then a lot in this life is a kind of theft or theft. This is especially true in the cultural sphere.: "Stealing is a philosophy, although educated people would say 'culture.' Yes, yes, culture. By stealing, you learn to absorb other people's thoughts. In art it's called inspiration, in the world of cinema it's called reference, and I say "theft" or plagiarism. The only difference is that in the case of culture, you don't take anything away from anyone for good, but just make a copy, which you then mentally leave to mature in your soul, get along with it."
There is much more of this kind of reasoning in the book than the details of the high-profile Antwerp case, where Notarbartolo's main contribution was the ingenious idea of defusing the Doppler radar in the vault by spraying it with hairspray. And before that, the author of the book, who also served a second term on false charges, has been engaged in petty "robbing" for several years, tracking down rich "pinocchio" and carefully expropriating their surpluses without much remorse: "They deserve their fate. And these are not banal rants in living rooms where respectable citizens lazily discuss class hatred. Nothing like that. Not even close. I'm giving back what was taken from me. I have people like me. Poor devils, deprived of the right to appeal." Notarbartolo intersperses social justifications for his criminal activities with existential and philosophical beauties.: "For me, theft is a kind of compensation for the mistakes of the universe, the restoration of justice. I am an astral mechanic, I fix carburettors and mufflers of fate."
However, the desire to learn how to survive honestly, without hop-stops and other criminality runs like a red thread through the entire book, the author of which is torn between two life paths: "On the one hand, Honesty pulls me by the scruff of the neck — a battered lady in a stretched blouse and with a black eye is reliable, but unappetizing. On the other hand, Dishonesty beckons — a seductive, sophisticated and determined girl." But inevitably there comes a moment when Notarbartolo is forced to finally give up and courageously state: "Fate does not want me to live honestly." Here again, a cinematic allusion turns up and the hero of Vasily Shukshin's film "Kalina Krasnaya" is recalled, with about the same ambiguous intonation, either complaining or proud: "I can't be anyone else on this earth — only a thief." At this moment, you can just see a stingy male tear sliding down the unshaven cheek of a reluctant gangster who combines the sincerity and openness of a "smiling optimist from Sicily" with the amazing coquetry of a homegrown philosopher and fighter against bourgeois hypocrisy, and not just for money.
Переведено сервисом «Яндекс Переводчик»
