Flawless: Inside the Largest Diamond Heist in History

Flawless: Inside the Largest Diamond Heist in History
Author: Scott Andrew Selby
Publisher: Sterling Publishing
Total Pages: 397
Release: 2010
Genre: True Crime
ISBN:

"Tells the story with the gripping pace of a true-crime 'Ocean's Eleven.'" The New York Post • "Like a diamond, this true-life caper is clear, colorful, and brilliant." Publishers Weekly ★Starred Review★ The Antwerp Diamond Center was one of the most secure buildings in the world. With hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of diamonds stored in its subterranean vault, it had to be. Located in the heart of Belgium's ultra-secure Antwerp Diamond District, it benefited from two police stations, armed patrols, extensive video surveillance, and vehicle barriers securing an area where 80 percent of the world's diamonds traded hands. But on February 15, 2003, a band of skilled Italian thieves — fronted by the charming Leonardo Notarbartolo, who spent over two years clandestinely casing the building — subverted every one of the Diamond Center's defenses and made off with a record amount of loot. Experts estimate they got away with nearly half a billion dollars in diamonds, cash and other valuables. They'd pulled off the biggest heist in history--everybody loves diamonds and they now had more than any thief before them. The robbers did it with stealth and smarts; no one was hurt or even threatened during what was quickly labeled the largest diamond heist in history. The bandits — members of a group of professional thieves known as "The School of Turin" — used cunning in lieu of violence, successfully evading security cameras, thwarting an array of electronic sensors, and penetrating a vault protected by a double-locked foot-thick steel door. Even when the police zeroed in on who committed the crime, how it was done remained a mystery, like something out of a heist movie or TV show. Flawless is a fast-paced global scavenger hunt uncovering the truth behind the daring Valentine's Day weekend heist. Tracking clues, sources, and documents throughout Europe — from seedy cafés in Turin, Italy to sleek diamond offices in Antwerp, Belgium — authors Scott Selby and Greg Campbell retrace Notarbartolo's careful discovery of the building's security flaws. They recreate the heist and its aftermath — detailing how the thieves brilliantly neutralized each element of the security protecting the Diamond Center's vault while inviting the readers into the secretive world of diamonds and diamond dealing. The result is a thrilling ride through the better-than-fiction heist of the century. "Fans of caper books and movies will be in seventh heaven." Booklist ★Starred Review★

Antwerp & the World

Antwerp & the World
Author: Paul Arblaster
Publisher: Leuven University Press
Total Pages: 324
Release: 2004
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9789058673473

Richard Verstegan is the usual English name of a man who went through early life as Richard Rowlands, before reverting to his ancestral Dutch surname in exile. Born in Mid-Tudor London around 1550 and dying in the Baroque Antwerp of 1640, his ninety-odd years of life saw numerous religious, political and military conflicts, in some of which he was a minor player and on almost all of which he commented in his writings. After studying at Oxford without taking a degree, training as a goldsmith and illegally printing a Catholic book, he fled to France, where he worked as a propagandist for the faction of the Duke of Guise. Imprisoned in France for these activities, he fled to Rome, and eventually settled in Antwerp, where he worked for almost fifty years as, variously, a newswriter, engraver, publisher, editor, translator, polemicist, antiquarian, cloth merchant, poet and satirist. He is one of the earliest identifiable European newspaper journalists, having worked on Abraham Verhoeven's Nieuwe Tijdinghen (Antwerp, 1620-1629).

The Diamond Trail

The Diamond Trail
Author: Shantanu Guha Ray
Publisher: Harper Collins
Total Pages: 188
Release: 2019-07-15
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 9353026806

If you visit Antwerp, the diamond market of the world, you will see for yourself how Indians have taken over the sleepy Belgian town, where bells in the biggest Hindu temple attract thousands of visitors every evening. Global diamond trade is now on a new chapter, and India is playing an important role in that. Diamonds are the second-largest export commodity from India after mineral fuels. With more than 80 per cent of the world's diamonds being cut and polished in Surat, India has become the processing house for the world's diamonds. But how did we get here?In The Diamond Trail, veteran journalist Shantanu Guha Ray charts the course of India's rise to domination in the diamond industry.

Europe's Babylon

Europe's Babylon
Author: Michael Pye
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 260
Release: 2021-09-07
Genre: History
ISBN: 1643137786

A revelatory history of Antwerp—from its rise to a world city to its fall in the Spanish Fury—by the New York Times Notable author of The Edge of the World. Before Amsterdam, there was a dazzling North Sea port at the hub of the known world: the city of Antwerp. In the Age of Exploration, Antwerp was sensational like nineteenth-century Paris or twentieth-century New York. It was somewhere anything could happen or at least be believed: killer bankers, easy kisses, a market in secrets and every kind of heresy. For half the sixteenth century, it was the place for breaking rules—religious, sexual, intellectual. And it was a place of change—a single man cornered all the money in the city and reinvented ideas of what money meant. Another gave the city a new shape purely out of his own ambition. Jews fleeing the Portuguese Inquisition needed Antwerp for their escape, thanks to the remarkable woman at the head of the grandest banking family in Europe. Thomas More opened Utopia there, Erasmus puzzled over money and exchanges, William Tyndale sheltered there and smuggled out his Bible in English until he was killed. Pieter Bruegel painted the town as The Tower of Babel. But when Antwerp rebelled with the Dutch against the Spanish and lost, all that glory was buried and its true history rewritten. The city that unsettled so many now became conformist. Mutinous troops burned the city records, trying to erase its true history. In Europe’s Babylon, Michael Pye sets out to rediscover the city that was lost and bring its wilder days to life using every kind of clue: novels, paintings, songs, schoolbooks, letters and the archives of Venice, London and the Medici. He builds a picture of a city haunted by fire, plague, and violence, but one that was learning how to be a power in its own right as it emerged from feudalism. An astounding and original narrative that illuminates this glamorous and bloody era of history and reveals how this fascinating city played its role in making the world modern.

The World's Work

The World's Work
Author: Walter Hines Page
Publisher:
Total Pages: 912
Release: 1919
Genre: American literature
ISBN:

A history of our time.

World's Fairs

World's Fairs
Author: Erik Mattie
Publisher: Princeton Architectural Press
Total Pages: 274
Release: 1998
Genre: History
ISBN: 9781568981321

As showcases of design, architecture, technology, industry and politics, world's fairs have served as overviews of society's accomplishments as well as barometers of the optimism for the future. While many of the products and ideas promoted at past fairs never materialized, many became commonplace: television, for example, was first shown at the 1939 New York fair. Similarly, while many buildings and landscapes built for fairs have become world-wide icons - the Eiffel Tower, the Crystal Palace, the Barcelona Pavilion, the Seattle Space Needle, the Buckminster Fuller Dome in Montreal - hundreds of splendid structures have been forgotten.

The World's Greatest War

The World's Greatest War
Author: Thomas Herbert Russell
Publisher: Brantford, Ont. : Bradley-Garretson
Total Pages: 532
Release: 1914
Genre: World War, 1914-1918
ISBN:

Gold Coins of the World - 9th edition

Gold Coins of the World - 9th edition
Author: Arthur L. Friedberg
Publisher: Coin & Currency Institute
Total Pages: 835
Release: 2017-01-05
Genre: Antiques & Collectibles
ISBN: 087184009X

A unique and indispensable reference work Unsurpassed in content and scope When the first edition of Gold Coins of the World made its debut in 1958, it forever changed the way gold coins were collected, cataloged, traded, and priced. For the first time, one book provided a reliable guide for a subject which previously required an often expensive investment in multiple volumes of literature, some of it rare and antique, and much of it badly out-of-date. With the publication of this pioneering work, Robert Friedberg (1912-1963) established himself as an international icon in the field of numismatic literature. This book, and the 'Friedberg Numbering System' he developed became then, and is still today, the internationally-recognized standard for systematically identifying any gold coin ever made. From just 384 pages in 1958, Gold Coins of the World has expanded to the extent that it now contains more than triple the information of its ancestor. It still stands alone as the first and only book to describe, catalog and price two millennia of gold, platinum, and palladium coin issues from across the globe. From the first coins of the ancient Greeks to the most recently-issued modern commemoratives, they are all here, an astonishing compilation of more than 21,000 individual coin listings accompanied by over 8,000 actual-size photographs. The prices have been completely updated, for the most part raised substantially, to reflect the current market. Entire sections have been expanded, many illustrations have been added or improved, and hundreds of new discoveries and recent issues have been included for the first time. Arthur Friedberg, president of the International Association of Professional Numismatists from 2001 to 2007 and now its Honorary President, and Ira Friedberg, have completely revised and expanded their late father's work. They have had the valuable assistance and cooperation of a who's who of the leading numismatists on every continent in bringing this edition to fruition. For the numismatist, banker, economist, historian, institution of higher learning, or a fancier of the noble metal in all its forms, Gold Coins of the World is a book for every library, public and private.