The $100 million diamond heist

Just a link post today.  Check out Wired magazine’s article “The Untold Story of the World’s Biggest Diamond Heist”.  Enthralling.  I would have much preferred they made The Bank Job about this heist.  Though I don’t imagine for a second that Hollywood producers aren’t putting together a project based on this robbery now.  Do you think Geoffrey Rush could play an hasidic diamond dealer?

It seems odd to me to see an exhaustive, hardly technical article on a diamond vault robbery in Antwerp, Belgium in Wired Magazine, but they gave it an excellent treatment.  Even if you have little interest in crime, heists, or technology, anyone with an ounce of ingenuity or curiousity should find the article enthralling.

(Though the wire cutting theory apparently espoused by the diamond police seems beyond unusual and actually baffling to me.  Someone explain to me how stripped wires suggest they were to be cut?  Personally, I don’t strip wires before cutting them…  And it sounds like the wires themselves were discrete, so there would be no reason to strip them prior to cutting them.  I need an explanation!)

And if you like this sorta howtheydunit crime story, check out one of my favorite documentaries, Cocaine Cowboys.

In both the Wired article and the documentary, it still  shocks me that the journalists (I guess) involved were able to find such forthcoming criminals, or coax such exposition from the subjects of their stories.

Do you think we’ll see this sort of exposition from Bernie Madoff, Hank Paulson, or Dick Cheney in a few years?

… and the cow goes moo