Intensity	Stupidity:Nudity Ratio 10:0	Budget Mafia Financed?

Okay, so this is not even about a movie. It is about a Wired Magazine article based on a true event (which nearly makes it a movie).

In February, 2003 Leonardo Notarbartolo and four clever accomplices robbed an underground vault in Antwerp getting away with about $100 million in diamonds and cash. After successfully avoiding setting off any alarms, they split up with plans to meet later. Leo only had one thing left to do, destroy the materials they had used to plan the robbery. Because of a panic attack by one of the others, the material was not completely destroyed and a couple of days later the owner of the land called the cops to report the "littering". When he mentioned that some of the litter seemed to be from the Antwerp Diamond Center, the cops showed up in force. Carefully piecing the information from the field together with video surveillance tapes, the cops were able to send four of the five bandits away for very short sentences; ten years for Leo and five each for the others.

So why am I writing about Joshua Davis' Wired Magazine article "The Untold Story of the World's Biggest Diamond Heist"? Because as I was reading the article I found myself wrapped up in the story like it was a classic B movie. Leo initially says that there is no way to break into the vault. The person trying to hire him builds a full scale model based off the pictures Leo took with a camera disguised as a pen and showed him step by step how it could be done. Man, I could hear the Mission Impossible theme music blasting away as the gang practice all the moves. They get away clean only to find out that most of the boxes they stole were empty. Instead of 100 mil it was more like 25. Then came the fatal mistake, a member of the team panics and does not destroy some incriminating papers. The cops quickly latch on to this and queue The Who as one of the Crime Scene Investigation team show up and start piecing the clues together with fast cuts between different forensic machines while making clever comments to each other. Soon enough they have their man and he is in jail where he details the entire thing to a reporter throwing in a twist at the end. Man this would make a great movie. Its got almost everything. The only thing missing would be that one of the guys should be a girl and she should have to get naked to solve one of the puzzles to get them into the vault.

Of course as soon as I started reading the article as a movie, I started picking it apart as a B movie. Allow me to expand on this.

First they are outside and then they are inside. Like many B movies the characters are outside and do something clever and implausible and then they are inside at the vault. After sneaking by a single motion detector, the are in a darkened stairwell where the Brain is able to disable the alarm system and then they have clear sailing down two flights of stairs to the vault room. Apparently the guy who designed the building found it advisable to leave the alarm control panel next to a window as opposed to the guard room. For that matter, why would you put a window in a stairwell in any secured building?

They sneak into the darkened vault room and put black plastic bags over the cameras before turning on the lights. Let me put this another way. The bank puts security cameras at key points in the vault and vault room and then makes them useless by turning out the lights. Completely ignoring for a moment (cause you'd better believe I am not going to let this slide) little things like motion detectors and infrared cameras, the turn off the fucking lights! Do you know why so many stores leave at least some lights on when no one is there? It is so that anyone can see when the place is being robbed. Motion detectors come in a variety of flavors but even the most basic camera software system has motion detection built into it. Nothing moving, cameras not running. 250 pound guy in black jump suit enters the vault and pushes aside a ceiling tile (yes, the interior of the vault has a drop ceiling) to fiddle with some wires, camera starts running. Infrared cameras do all this but in a light range people can't see.

The motion detector that is there is tied to a heat sensor and the alarm doesn't go off unless both are tripped. I simply don't know what to say. The guards here have got one hell of a union.

Using the combination gleaned from a hidden video camera, they opened the combination lock to the vault. Six months earlier someone had managed to hide a high res video camera directly above the combination lock capturing not only the combination but high quality images of the key. Six months later, the combination still worked. A vault containing over 200 million dollars and a six month old combination worked. The lock used four 2 digit numbers. How much you want to bet that the manager used his birth date or better yet 05 04 19 26 (Roger Corman's birth date in European notation). Ignoring the fact that someone had to get in and place the camera and retrieve it, they also planned to use the footage to manufacture a key.

But wait, they didn't need to. Based on watching video tape of the guards opening and closing the vault (you know I think I saw that on You Tube), the guards often entered a utility room before opening the vault. A quick check and what do you know, a key. So, as I wrote that I got a horrid suspicion. Checking the magazine it is indeed the April edition. Wary of being fooled by pranksters again, I checked the internet and this is a real event. Oh, and JJ Abrahms apparently has the movie rights. Where was I? Oh, yeah, the guards tended to stash the key in a broom closet. In his article, Davis cites this as " a major security lapse". Ya think?

Once they had the vault ready to open, there was one last little thing to take care of. You know those little magnetic window alarms that you can get for about two bucks at any hardware store? The type that when they get moved apart the alarm goes off. Turns out the vault had one of those so any time the vault was opened, the alarm would go off. Perhaps the installer did not read the instructions properly because the alarm was mounted on the outside of the vault. Using double-sided tape and an aluminum block (non-ferrous) they simply tied the two pieces together and unscrewed it from the vault. Yup, it was not put on the inside of the vault or even within the door itself. It was mounted on the outside of the door with screws.

Here's the best part. Remember that Union the guard have? The one that seems to let them leave the keys to the vault lying around and cripples the alarms so that they don't go off? Apparently it keeps them from having to make a physical inspection of the place for days at a time. It sounds like no one visited the vault from late Saturday evening until 7 am Monday morning. Now the Mission Impossible theme music has been banished from my head, but I am torn between Full Moon Productions and the Zucker brothers. Honestly it is a toss up between ripped off classical music and blow whistles.

If I were to rate this as a movie, the plot would be so unbelievable that I would give it 7 or 8 for stupidity. This is another one of those stories where great detail is provided about non-important details and big events are glossed over. We get detailed explanations of how things work and then stupid workarounds to get by them. I have not come close to picking apart all the obvious holes in this story. Were this a B movie, I would say that the bank was involved in the details of the vault to make sure that none of the real security measures were shown. Much like "Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Weapon" when an Omega D-55 photo enlarger stood in for a classified bomb sight, I would imagine that actually detailing how to rob a bank would be frowned on by the Chase Corporation. Basically any movie with a plot so outlandishly silly as this one, would rate only one cup of coffee and be subject to a page of ridicule much like this one.

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