“We accomplished an endeavor that looked so impenetrable. We felt really proud for doing something so strong, powerful.” Featured in the Netflix documentary Stolen: Heist of the Century, written and directed by Mark Lewis (Don’t Fuck With Cats), are extensive interviews with the man Belgian authorities call the mastermind of a 2003 Antwerp Diamond Center robbery that netted hundreds of millions in loot. This kind of access makes Stolen feel credible, and not just fodder for the sensational, a feeling Netflix has been also been feeding with its Trainwreck docs. So we felt comfortable with this documentary’s light touch, which applies the facts of the case to a timeline full of references to the look and feel of heists in fictional movies.
The Gist: In Antwerp, there is a tiny square of a Diamond District, through which passes most of the world’s very finest stones. As you’d imagine it’s a high security area, with plenty of armed guards and man traps, surveillance cameras for days, and in the sublevels, a custom vault with its own finetuned sensors and a magnetic field applied to a foot-thick steel door. So how is it that in February 2003, the Antwerp Diamond Center opened one morning to discover its security measures breached and hundreds of safe deposit boxes in its vault looted?
Stolen: Heist of the Century interviews Agim De Bruycker, former commander of Belgium’s Federal Police Diamond Squad, as well as Detective Patrick Peys. They were both on duty back in 2003, and immediately knew it wasn’t just another robbery. “This was an inside job,” De Bruycker remembers thinking. But their initial investigation only proved how “flawless” the diamond haul really was. (Stolen is based on Flawless, the 2003 book by Scott Andrew Selby and Greg Campbell.)
As Stolen accounts for valuable physical evidence the cops eventually find, it features security camera footage and still photos from the real crime scene, and includes the usual round of reenactments for true crime-zoned documentaries of this type. But as De Bruycker and Peys speak, it also switches over to interviews with an Italian man named Leonardo Notarbartolo. “I said yes because I always wanted to be part of something like this.” That’s right, Notarbartolo is speaking pleasantly with his interviewer about taking part in one of the biggest diamond robberies of all time.
Maybe, as police assert, it was Notarbartolo who masterminded the crime, and handpicked his team from a group of skilled heisters known as the “School of Turin.” There was The Monster. The Genius. The Key Master. If there was a subplot with a love connection, then it would really feel like a movie. But then again, maybe the yarn Notarbartolo weaves, a tale full of vault replicas built offsite and clever workarounds of Diamond Center’s security – the rhythms of which form the bulk of the doc’s reenactments – are just more of what Detective Peys calls “the category of bullshit.” Either way, Stolen: Heist of the Century has an entertaining crime story to tell.
What Movies Will It Remind You Of? If you saw Den of Thieves 2: Pantera, you’re gonna be watching Heist of the Century when it hits you: the movements of Donny, O’Shea Jackson, Jr.’s master thief character, are exactly as Leonardo Notorbartolo describes his own.
It’s actually surprising there isn’t more stuff, dramatically or via documentary, about this “heist of the century,” especially as we continue to live in the True Crime Era. But a few years back, Prime Video did put out Everybody Loves Diamonds, based directly on the Antwerp job. And Netflix has The Diamond Heist, a slick docuseries with exec production from Guy Ritchie about a bold 2000 heist in London. And speaking of Netflix, Heist of the Century also reminded us of Berlin, which features Pedro Alonso in a prequel look at his charismatic thief character from Money Heist.
Performance Worth Watching: We were thinking of Alonso’s smooth operator-ness in Berlin especially during the Heist of the Century interviews with Leonardo Notorbartolo. Notorbartolo is quite charming as he speaks openly about that doin’ crimes life, especially as it relates to stealing gems and jewels.
Memorable Dialogue: As their investigation ramped up, the cops had to hand it to the heisters. Peter Kerkhof, Federal Police forensics: “I was impressed. My colleagues were impressed. It was flawlessly executed.”
And Agim De Bruycker, later: “Looking at the ingenuity of their work, I could not believe this.”
Sex and Skin: None.
Our Take: The reenactments in Stolen: Heist of the Century are slick like Soderbergh. The doc even applies motion box editing and a peppy percussive jazz soundtrack to the proceedings, just for more of that Ocean’s 11 flavor. This is not new. The docuseries Cocaine Air did it just a few months ago. But we’re gonna let some of that similarity slide, because as a style it works really well in the context of Stolen, especially as the doc bounces the authorities’ official investigation off how Leonardo Notorbartolo says it all went down.
“It was like a big puzzle,” the cops say at one point, “with all the pieces in the wrong order.” With this notion as a guide, we were entertained by Stolen letting its two sides of the story guide the various pieces in two different directions, the way a heist film might misdirect its audience. (There is always a late-in-the-game double cross, or Murphy’s Law effect.) We felt informed – of particular interest is how police utilized cell tower location data, still an emerging technology in 2003 – but we mostly just enjoyed letting the doc play out. Sure, it’s true crime. But it also embraces the watchability of a movie.
Our Call: STREAM IT. Stolen: Heist of the Century takes a measured approach to laying out its story – then fucks with that merrily by bringing in a guy who directly admits his involvement in a high-profile robbery. You might believe the cops, you might believe the criminal. But either way you’re in for a ride.
Johnny Loftus (@johnnyloftus.bsky.social) is a Chicago-based writer. A veteran of the alternative weekly trenches, his work has also appeared in Entertainment Weekly, Pitchfork, The All Music Guide, and The Village Voice.