Nearly a decade after a brazen diamond heist at Brussels Airport, it looks like it was a near-perfect crime. While Marc Bertoldi a luxury car dealer from the French Riviera, was convicted and sentenced to 5 years in prison, 18 other people were acquitted in 2018 and 4 more were acquitted in 2023, leaving it unclear whether the mastermind will ever be found. The robbery has been compared to the movie Ocean’s Eleven for its clean, clinical execution that left no one hurt. On a wintry evening in 2013, 8 robbers dressed in police uniforms cut through security fences at Brussels Airport and headed for a plane bound for Switzerland where parcels of diamonds from the nearby Antwerp global diamond hub were being loaded. They brandished machine guns at pilots and security officials, got into the hold of the plane, and took off with 120 parcels. It barely took 5 minutes, and none of the 29 passengers on the plane knew anything was happening. Because of the perfection of the operation, it was immediately suspected that they received help from inside the airport. Investigators thought they were close to finding the robbers several times, but the courts found the evidence unconvincing. Although a small portion of the diamonds were recovered with the arrest of Bertoldi, the rest of the diamonds have never been found.
