Norman Borlaug, Nobel laureate for fighting famine, dies

Norman Borlaug, Nobel laureate for fighting famine, dies

04:24 PM CDT on Sunday, September 13, 2009

By DAVID TARRANT / The Dallas Morning News
dtarrant@dallasnews.com Dr. Norman Borlaug, the Nobel Prize-winning scientist and father of the "green revolution" who was credited with saving 1 billion lives from famine, died in Dallas at age 95.
Dr. Borlaug died late Saturday night at his home from complications of cancer, said Kathleen Phillips, a Texas A&M University spokeswoman.

FILE/AP

Norman Borlaug looked over some sorghum tests in one of Texas A&M University's teaching greenhouses in October 1996.

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Julie Borlaug said her grandfather had time in recent weeks to say goodbye to his children, grandchildren and close friends. One of his last visitors was former Texas A&M president Elsa Murano, who assured him that his colleagues would continue his efforts to combat world hunger.
"And he said 'What about Africa?'" his granddaughter recalled. "And I think that's a testament to the kind of person he was – concerned right to the end."
Dr. Borlaug had been a distinguished professor at Texas A&M in College Station since 1984. He taught during the fall semester and worked the rest of the year on projects to combat world hunger.
"We have lost our strongest champion for reducing hunger worldwide," Dr. Mark Hussey, vice chancellor and dean of agriculture and life sciences at Texas A&M University, said in a statement issued Sunday. "We must now recommit ourselves to educating and training the next generation of agricultural scientists who will continue Dr. Borlaug's work to reduce world hunger and eliminate famine."
The Nobel committee honored Dr. Borlaug in 1970 for his contributions to high-yield crop varieties and bringing agricultural innovations to the developing world. Many experts credit the green revolution with averting global famine during the second half of the 20th century and saving perhaps 1 billion lives.
"More than any other single person of his age, he has helped to provide bread for a hungry world," Nobel Peace Prize committee chairman Aase Lionaes said in presenting the award to Dr. Borlaug. "We have made this choice in the hope that providing bread will also give the world peace."
His roots were in rural America and the Great Depression had a profound influence on his life.
Born March 25, 1914, on his grandparents' farm in Iowa, he attended grade school in a one-room schoolhouse. He played football and baseball, but credited wrestling for teaching him to persevere and give "105 percent."
During the Depression, Dr. Borlaug saw many malnourished men. Their plight stayed with him, he told The Dallas Morning News in a 2007 interview.
"You'd see young people asking for a nickel to buy bread and older people sleeping in the park," he said. "We were a pretty sick nation at that time. It made me tough. I was angry that this kind of condition could exist and persist in our own society."
After World War II, he joined a new program funded by the Rockefeller Foundation to assist poor farmers in Mexico. With a team of young scientists from all over the world, he developed the disease-resistant wheat distinguished by their higher yields and greater adaptability.
In the mid-'60s, doomsayers predicted that war and overpopulation would produce mass starvation in India and Pakistan - and nothing could be done about it. Dr. Borlaug thought his new wheat seeds could help prevent the looming catastrophe.
Bureaucrats initially thwarted him. But as the famine grew worse, he was permitted to move forward. Within a year, wheat yields more than doubled. Over the next eight years, the two countries became self-sufficient in wheat production. In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Dr. Borlaug quoted the prize's creator, Alfred Nobel: "I would rather take care of the stomachs of the living than the glory of the departed in the form of monuments."
In July 2007, Dr. Borlaug received the Congressional Gold Medal, the highest civilian honor given by Congress.
Though fame eluded him, he had probably done more than anyone else in history to make the world a better place, said Dr. Ed Runge, retired head of Texas A&M's Department of Soil and Crop Sciences and a close friend who recruited Dr. Borlaug to teach at the university.
Dr. Runge said the two had met in Dallas last week. "I felt he would rank up there with President Franklin Roosevelt and Prime Minister Winston Churchill. I told him: 'They won the war, but you won the food war.' "
In recent years, Dr. Borlaug had been battling lymphoma. Margaret, the wife of 69 years whom he met in college, died in 2007. She was 95.
He is survived by daughter Jeanie Borlaug Laube and her husband Rex; son William Gibson Borlaug and his wife Barbie; five grandchildren and six great-grandchildren.
Julie Borlaug said her grandfather will be cremated, and that plans are being made to hold a memorial service at Texas A&M on Oct. 6. Former presidents Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush are tentatively scheduled to speak.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Autônomo que vira microempreendedor individual economiza em impostos e garante benefícios

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Autônomo que vira microempreendedor individual economiza em impostos e garante benefícios

Publicada em 11/09/2009 às 17h05m
Vivian Pereira Nunes

RIO - O autônomo que tem faturamento de até R$ 36 mil por ano pode economizar no pagamento de impostos e garantir ao mesmo tempo acesso a benefícios como auxílio-doença, licença-maternidade e aposentadoria, ao se tornar um microempreendedor individual (MEI). O custo mensal disso é de R$ 51,15 (INSS), mais R$ 5 no caso de prestadores de serviço ou R$ 1 para quem tem atividades ligadas ao comércio e à indústria.

O MEI é dispensado ainda de emitir nota fiscal para consumidores finais, mas pode fornecer o documento para órgãos que o exigem para comprovar a realização dos serviços. Uma vez por ano, até o final do mês de janeiro, é necessário fazer a declaração anual de faturamento à Receita Federal, embora a categoria seja isenta de pagar Imposto de Renda (IR).

Entretanto, para se tornar um microempreendedor individual, é preciso desempenhar uma atividade que esteja na lista do programa lançado em julho pelo Ministério do Desenvolvimento, Indústria e Comércio Exterior (MDIC), com o objetivo de incentivar a formalização de 10 milhões de profissionais. Entre as funções listadas estão as de pintor, cabeleireiro, manicure, sapateiro, pipoqueiro, entre outros.

Atualmente, é possível fazer a adesão ao programa em nove estados - Ceará, Espírito Santo, Minas Gerais, Paraná, Rio de Janeiro, Rio Grande do Sul, Santa Catarina e São Paulo - e no Distrito Federal. As demais unidades da federação devem ser incluídas até o fim do ano.

Além de preencher os requisitos de renda e atividade, o interessado não pode ter sócio, participar de outra empresa e contratar mais de um empregado. Para dar início ao processo de se tornar um microempreendedor individual fazendo sua inscrição gratuita no Portal do Empreendedor. Ele pode contar ainda com a ajuda gratuita do Sebrae e de uma empresa de contabilidade que tenha sido beneficiada pelo Simples Nacional (há uma lista disponível no mesmo site.

Graças a um convênio com a Federação Nacional das Empresas de Serviços Contábeis (Fenacon), o microempreendedor individual pode ser atendido gratuitamente por um contador, que fica responsável por todo o processo de inscrição e pela prestação de contas do primeiro ano. Em troca, as empresas de contabilidade se beneficiarem de taxações menores,
Como é o processo

O primeiro passo do processo para virar microempreendedor individual é escolher o nome da empresa e verificar se ele já não existe, o que pode ser feito no próprio site portal do empreendor. Depois, deve-se preencher a ficha de inscrição, informando os dados pessoais e os da empresa a ser aberta, junto com uma declaração de ciência e cumprimento da legislação. Feito isso, segundo o MDIC, o empreendedor recebe automaticamente os registros no CNPJ, na Junta Comercial e na Previdência Social, além de um documento com valor de alvará de funcionamento.

Para concluir o processo, será gerado um documento, que deverá ser impresso, assinado, anexado a uma cópia do RG e enviado à Junta Comercial num prazo de até 60 dias. O envio do requerimento à Junta é necessário porque a lei exige assinatura do interessado. O interessado pode contar com a ajuda de um contador para agilizar esta última etapa.
Facilidade para pagar impostos

Concluída a inscrição na Junta Comercial, o empreendedor deverá solicitar no site a emissão do Documento de Arrecadação Simplificada (DAS), por meio do qual fará o pagamento do imposto único mensal. Como esse valor é fixo, ele poderá solicitar o DAS para o ano inteiro e pagar mês a mês.

O microempreendedor individual também tem benefícios na hora de contratar um empregado. Enquanto, para um empresário normal, o custo de um funcionário pode chegar a 20% do salário do profissional, este paga apenas 3% do valor bruto à Previdência Social e 8% para o Fundo de Garantia do Tempo de Serviço (FGTS).

Church Gunman Left Online Rant Between Shootings - New Life Church, Bill Gothard, Jeanne Assam

Church Gunman Left Online Rant Between Shootings

Murray's Writings Echo Columbine Gunman's Manifesto

POSTED: 10:20 am MST December 11, 2007

UPDATED: 6:04 pm MST December 11, 2007

DENVER -- Web site postings that authorities believe were the work of shooter Matthew Murray paint a picture of a young man angry at his religious home-schooling, enraged with organized religion and furious with Youth With A Mission.His rage explodes in a posting that appeared to have been made between the shootings in Arvada and Colorado Springs on Sunday, saying, "You christians brought this on yourselves ... I'm coming for EVERYONE soon and I WILL be armed to the @#%$ teeth and I WILL shoot to kill. .... God, I can't wait till I can kill you people."Murray, who police said shot and killed two people at the missionary center and two people at the megachurch, copied from the manifesto of Columbine High School shooter Eric Harris in his post on a site for ex-Pentecostals.
"Feel no remorse, no sense of shame, I don't care if I live or die in the shoot-out. All I want to do is kill and injure as many of you as I can especially Christians who are to blame for most of the problems in the world."The rant was posted at 11:03 a.m. -- about 10 hours after the first shooting at the Youth With A Mission and two hours before the shooting at New Life Church. It was posted by "nghtmrchld26, " whom authorities believe was Murray.The only change of substance Murray made to Harris's writings was to replace the name of Harris target, classmate and neighbor Brooks Brown, with "Christians who are to blame for most of the problems in the world."This is the rest of that posting from Sunday afternoon:

"Well all you people out there can just kiss my a** and die. From now on I don't give a @#%$ about what you mutha f____ have to say, unless I respect you which is highly unlikely, but for those of you who do happen to know me and know that I respect you, may peace be with you and don't be in my line of fire, for the rest of you, you all better @#%$ hide in your houses because I'm coming for EVERYONE soon."No I am not crazy, crazy is just a word, to me it has no meaning, everyone is different, but most of you @#%$ heads there in society, going to your everyday @#%$ jobs and doing everyday routine shi____y things, I say @#%$ you and die ...."DEAD PEOPLE DON'T ARGUE. My belief is that if I say something, it goes. I am the law ... Dead people can't do many things like argue, whine, @#%$, complain, name, rat out, criticize, or even @#%$ talk. So that's the only way to solve argument with all you f__heads out there, I just kill. God, I can't wait till I can kill you people, I'll just go to some downtown area in some big city and blow up and shoot everything I can."You break my back but you won't break me ... all is black but I still see...shut me down, knock me to the floor... shoot me up, @#%$ me like a whore, trapped under ice, comfortably cold, I've gone as low as you can go ... feel no remorse, no sorrow or shame .... time's gonna wash away all pain I made a God out of blood not superiority I killed the king of deceit and now I sleep in anarchy."

The last part of that posting is from the song "Anarchy" by rock band KMFDM. It is the same lyrics that Columbine gunman Harris had posted.Before that last post, he had written a post saying goodbye to everyone in the forum, thanking them for listening to him."You guys were awesome. It's time for me to head out and teach these ******* a lesson ... See you all on the other side, we're leaving this nightmare behind to a better place," he wrote.At least one visitor to the site was alarmed and contacted the FBI promptly, before the second attack, the site's administrator said. But the FBI would not immediately confirm that.Denver FBI spokeswoman Rene Vonder Haar said the agency began an investigation immediately after receiving a phone call at 10:30 a.m. on Sunday. She refused to discuss the nature of the call but said the information was passed on to police in Arvada and Colorado Springs.

Posts Show Murray's Anger At Christianity, Homeschooling

In the weeks before the shooting, nghtmrchld26 posted a number of messages about his own pain, despair and fury toward Christianity.In another posting on Dec. 1, on the expentacostal.org Web site, nghtmrchld26 posted wrote about the "insane things" he went through in Christian homeschool.

"I remember the beatings and the fighting and yelling and insane rules and the Bill Gothard bull**** and then trancing out ... I remember how it was like every day was Mission Impossible trying to keep the rules or not get caught. My mother's a f***ing psycho too, her and her whole church and Christian family."We both went through some insane stuff growing up in The Nightmare that outsiders just do not understand."Of course people will say the usual fake answers 'just stop being this way and be happy from now on ...' 'We don't have the time and the energy to give a s*** about you ...''You're not the only one who has it bad' 'I had it a lot worse than you and I'm happy and doing great' 'You're not popular you know ... no one likes you very much.'"'It's almost like you've come back from a war and are having flashbacks.'" ONE MORE, just ONE MORE bit of psychological abuse from your mother and you WALK, you are OUT THAT DOOR saying,'I won't live like this anymore EVER.'"I'm not getting any younger and it's time for the abuse to stop. Just because I'm no one of the "Beautiful People" just because other people don't understand or because I'm not popular does not mean I need to take any more s*** from anyone."

He ends that post with "Cherish Your Life."Nghtmrchld26 had been posting to the site for at least 11 months, ranting against conservative religious organizations."The way I see it, why should we allow some Pentecostal charlatan "prophet," or church or group such as C. Peter Wagner or YWAM/King's Kids Denver or other self-appointed "source of Truth" like Bill Gothard to dictate who's going to hell and who's not and who's accepted and who's out casted?," he wrote Oct. 6. "I remember growing up in pentecostalism/evangelicalism, we were always told to support republicans/conservatives and to hate those evil satanic democrats. Jesus never said to put trust in any political leaders." "We'll make our own religion and be our own God's instead listening to some abusive pedophile church like what I was raised in telling us who's 'saved' and who's not," the person wrote. "During this dark period I've realized this is not the way just to be a martyr. I can't walk alone any longer and I'll fight for the ones who can't fight. If I lose at then least I tried. If I have to give my life you can have it."

The YWAM Connection

One post, called "My YWAM Horror Story," complained about being removed from the Arvada youth mission program. "Why was I told that I couldn't be a missionary because I wasn't 'social enough'? I was told that I was 'an introvert,"' nghtmrchld26 wrote. "Everyone else got to go on their outreaches except for a few who lied about smoking (cigarettes). The authoritarianism and hypocrisy is outrageous."People on the discussion board tried to help Murray, but Murray appeared to reject offers of psychological help. "I've already been working with counselors," he wrote. He added: "I have a point to make with all this talk about psychologists and counselors 'helping people with their pain.' It's so funny how many people want to help you and love you and counsel you and `work with you through your pain' when there's money involved."Murray also writes that he is deeply moved by rock music from Madonna to Marilyn Manson, calling it his "drug addiction.""Well, one of the main persons who has helped make this drug a powerful force in my life has been Marilyn Manson," he writes in a Nov. 11 post titled "Secret Addiction."

CNN A former roommate took this photo of Matthew Murray performing in a December 14, 2002, Christmas program.

A picture of Murray, obtained by CNN, shows a pale, scrawny young man, wearing thick glasses and skull cap. The picture was taken by Richard Werner, who was working at the missionary center in Arvada in 2002, when Murray was going through the discipleship program.

Murray Was Thrown Out Of Youth With A Mission

Police said in 2002, Murray had been thrown out of Youth With A Mission, the site of the first shooting where staff members Tiffany Johnson, 26, and Philip Crouse, 24, were killed.Colorado Springs police said the "common denominator in both locations" was Youth With a Mission. The training center maintains an office at the 10,000-member New Life Church in Colorado Springs, the site of the second shooting.The victims at New Life Church -- sisters Stephanie Works, 18, and Rachel Works, 16 -- were involved with a summer outreach organized by New Life Church and a ministry of YWAM, according to a statement released by Youth With A Mission.The statement said that Murray was "briefly a student at the YWAM Arvada training centre in 2002."Murray was enrolled in a Discipleship Training School but did not complete the program, which is a 12-week classroom course followed by a 12-week field assignment."Murray did not complete the lecture phase of his Discipleship Training School, nor did he participate in the field assignment," the statement said. "The program directors felt that issues with his health made it inappropriate for him to do so. Murray left the Arvada training center and no one at the facility recalls that he has made any other visits or had any communication with the center since that time."Several agencies searched Murray's home in unincorporated Arapahoe County, where he lived with his parents, looking for additional weapons and his computer.In a search warrant affidavit, investigators said Murray attended a home-based computer school and worked at his computer for three to five hours a day for the past two years. Police said Murray's only previous brush with the law was a traffic ticket earlier this year.Murray died at New Life Church after an exchange of gunfire with volunteer security guard Jeanne Assam.Assam wounded him with several shots and forced him on the ground. According to the report of the El Paso County coroner, Murray died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound, though police and church leaders credited Assam's bravery with averting a greater tragedy.Assam, an ex-Minneapolis police officer, said her faith allowed her to remain steady under pressure."It seemed like it was me, the gunman and God," she said, her hands trembling as she recounted the shooting during a news conference.

Sarah Palin, faith-based mayor

How the vice-presidential nominee brought fringe biblical teachings to her work as the chief of Wasilla, Alaska.

Editor's note: You can find Salon's complete coverage of Sarah Palin here.

By Sarah Posner

AP Photo/Mat-Su Valley Frontiersman

Mayor Sarah Palin in her office in Wasilla, Alaska, in October 1996.

Sept. 18, 2008 | In April 2000, under the direction of then-Mayor Sarah Palin, the Wasilla City Council passed a resolution declaring itself a "City of Character." Adopted unanimously, the resolution pledged that the city would "do all in its power" to promote "positive and constructive character qualities which distinguish between right and wrong," which the resolution predicted could work a range of wonders, from reducing juvenile delinquency to increasing corporate profits.
Thanks to Palin's efforts, Wasilla is now among roughly 200 cities nationwide (and others in 27 countries around the world) that have committed themselves -- in name, at least -- to following the teachings of the International Association of Character Cities (IACC), an organization that purports to be secular but is modeled on the evangelical teachings of the Institute in Basic Life Principles (IBLP).
Palin's personal connection to IACC, and her efforts to bring its agenda to Wasilla as mayor, sheds new light on her connections to the Christian far right, as well as her willingness to infuse government with its ideals rooted in religion. Her championing of IACC principles raises further questions about Palin's views on running government, including the hiring and firing of government employees, an area in which she has come under intense scrutiny in part due to her involvement in "trooper gate."

By becoming a City of Character, Wasilla under Palin committed to adhering to 49 "character qualities" as outlined by the IACC, which are secularized versions of IBLP's 49 "character qualities" derived from the Bible. Critics have charged that the organization and its affiliated Character Training Institute are for all intents and purposes a front group for the evangelical IBLP.
IBLP was founded in 1974 by evangelist Bill Gothard "for the purpose of introducing people to the Lord Jesus Christ," and is "dedicated to giving individuals, families, churches, schools, communities, governments, and businesses clear instruction and training on how to find success by following God's principles found in Scripture." IBLP claims to have taught over 2.5 million people its Basic Life Principles seminar, and boasts assets exceeding $100 million, an affiliated correspondence college course program and an unaccredited law school.
The IACC, says its director, Steven Menzel, is not a religious organization. Instead, he points to its practical effects. When IACC's founder, Oklahoma City businessman Thomas Hill, was having difficulties with the workforce of his company, Kimray, in the 1990s, IACC legend has it that his adoption of Gothard's "character approach" led to a 90 percent drop in workers' compensation claims and a 60 to 70 percent drop in turnover. "The change in that company was so profound," said Menzel, that local companies asked Hill to teach "character" to them as well, leading to the Character First program that is the backbone of IACC and CTI.

Palin, Menzel confirmed, learned how Wasilla could become a City of Character at an IACC conference held at IBLP's International Training Center in Indianapolis in April 2000. A conference brochure shows that Gothard and other speakers affiliated with IBLP taught several of the sessions. The conference included a videotape presentation on the separation of church and state by David Barton, a regular on the Christian right speaking circuit who argues that the separation of church and state is a "myth."
Although Menzel and the IACC's materials insist that the program Hill launched at his company is secular, IBLP's Web site boasts that as a result of Hill's efforts, Kimray "benefited from the application of Biblical principles." Menzel admitted to the Texas Observer two years ago that "these are biblical principles." Hill has ties to Gothard dating back to 1974; he served on IBLP's board of directors from 1993 to 2005, and is currently on its "board of reference."
Gothard's teachings, and his implementation of them, are highly controversial even among evangelical Christians. Based on seven "non-optional" biblical principles, Gothard demands obedience to "God-ordained authorities, such as parents, government, and the church."
In 2003, the flagship evangelical magazine Christianity Today observed, "an important issue to consider regarding Gothard's influence is that it is directed to the core leadership of our nation's conservative Christian churches. Gothard has largely succeeded in reaching that audience. While many have winked at Gothard's teachings on authority, what's more alarming is how readily his supporters accept his interpretation of Scripture," which he reads "through an authoritarian lens."
The teachings have bubbled beneath some disturbing events. Matthew Murray, who shot two people at a Colorado church last December, blamed his troubles on his authoritarian home-school curriculum from IBLP. Gothard denied that his curriculum played any role in Murray's dysfunction.
In Indianapolis, a City of Character, an IBLP-run juvenile center -- housed in the same building where Palin attended the April 2000 conference -- was embroiled in an investigation of child abuse, including spanking and restraining children and committing them for days to the solitary confinement of a "prayer room" without food. The center was cleared after a state investigation in 2004, although it did abandon the practice of spanking while under scrutiny, according to news reports.
Through its Character First training seminars, IACC has spread its gospel of character to local government officials like Palin as well as to Fortune 500 companies, law enforcement agencies, federal government agencies, and the private prison giant Corrections Corporation of America, which uses the character training in its prisons. Character First principles are taught in hundreds of public schools across the country.
Each of the 49 character qualities, as outlined by Gothard, have a biblical basis and are therefore required for believers to fulfill God's goal "to transform them into the image of His Son so that they may be a reflection of the character of Christ." The character quality of diligence, for example, is rooted in Colossians 3:23 ("Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for men,") meaning, for Gothard, that one should "visualiz[e] each task as a special assignment from the Lord and us[e] all my energies to accomplish it."

IACC's secularized version requires one to "invest my time and energy to complete each task assigned to me," and is compared, like Gothard's version, to the diligence of a beaver. (Each character quality is linked to an animal, although apparently none to the barracuda.)
The desired implementation of a City of Character's mission is somewhat murky. Menzel advocates using the character qualities as a guide for hiring or promoting employees, and suggested advertising the "character quality of the month" through posters and billboards. He could not point to a policy initiative Palin undertook as mayor to advance the character initiative, and he expressed disappointment that Wasilla, Alaska's only City of Character, had not done more to advance the cause.
But Sandy Holladay, who heads the Alaska Councils of Character, which works with the IACC to encourage more municipalities to become Cities of Character, notes ways in which the teachings permeated the town government under Palin. Holladay, who said she met Palin once, in 2001, said she recalled that Wasilla put the teachings' "character quality of the month" on city employee paychecks and utility bills, and displayed posters provided by the CTI. (Utility bills in Wasilla began bearing the words, "Wasilla: A City of Character! Help us promote good character in our community!" shortly after the resolution passed.)
Mary Bixby, executive assistant to Wasilla's current mayor, Dianne Keller, said that the city no longer sends a representative to the CTI conferences, but it still receives materials from the organization. The city gives out certificates of good character to citizens who do "heroic deeds," she said, like turning in a lost wallet to the police department, and recognizes employees of "good character" in the employee newsletter. She said she admires the book outlining all the character traits, which she did not view as religious in nature, and added she would like to do more to study and promote it.
Menzel maintains that Palin exhibited the character quality of discernment, because after she took in the program at the Indianapolis conference in 2000 "she immediately returned to Wasilla and implemented it." Menzel described discernment as "understanding the deeper reason of why things happen." (Gothard describes it as "the God-given ability to understand why things happen.")
But perhaps above all, Menzel said, Palin exhibits boldness -- "a confidence in what I have to say or do is true, right, and just." (Gothard's definition, citing Acts 4:29, is "confidence that what I have to say or do is true and just and right in the sight of God.") Menzel added, "I think that really epitomizes her character, that boldness."

Kidnapped oil rig worker in Nigeria

Kidnapped McKinney Man Gets an Up-Close Look Into Nigeria's Oily Heart of Darkness

By Chris Vogel

published: July 09, 2009

• Allison V. Smith

  

• Courtesy of Larry Plake

  

  Plake (seated far right) talks to A Russian reporter who stumbled upon the hostages while writing a story about the Niger Delta region.

• Courtesy of Larry Plake

  

  Members of the Niger-Delta Freedom Fighters held Plake hostage at their camp for three weeks.

• Courtesy of Larry Plake

  

  These guards working aboard Plake’s oil barge were wounded defending the ship against attackers. The other guards, Plake says, ditched their weapons and hid in the bottom of the boat.

• Courtesy of Larry Plake

  

• Allison V. Smith

  

  Larry Plake and his wife, Collette, are still trying to work through his recovery after he was taken hostage two years ago.

• Courtesy of Larry Plake

  

  Bullets tore holes in the side of the oil barge and Plake’s bedroom door, while gunmen took him hostage in the control tower.

• Courtesy of Larry Plake

  

  Bullets tore holes in the side of the oil barge and Plake’s bedroom door, while gunmen took him hostage in the control tower.

Subject(s):

Oil, Nigeria, kidnapping

Larry Plake was just outside the control tower on his way to bed aboard the Cheyenne, an oil barge anchored six miles off the coast of Nigeria, when he heard the shots. A veteran rig worker for Houston-based oil and gas contractor Global Industries, Plake, a Texan through and through, had just finished his evening shift and was in a bad mood after dining on a subpar version of African-style barbecued spareribs. At first, the "pop pop pop" sounded like someone lighting a blowtorch. But the deafening sound of bullets ricocheting off steel and bursting through the metal sides of the ship was unmistakable. They were under attack. Plake never fit the stereotype of an offshore oilman. At 37, he was slight, with wiry arms and a head of prematurely gray hair. He'd worked offshore much of his adult life and was one of the few men aboard who'd earned a pair of college degrees along the way. But he was a hard-working, cocky son of a bitch with a young face and a dry sense of humor—all of which made him popular and a natural leader with the crew.
Plake entered the control room to find barge foreman Kevin Faller and fellow crewmembers Mike Roussel and Chris Gay crouched below the windows. They seemed paralyzed, so Plake grabbed the CB radio and began calling for help. He had memorized the security protocol checklist and began going through the steps.
"We're taking hits," he radioed a nearby support vessel, there to help Plake and the crew build pipelines for Chevron. "Cut and run! Cut and run!"
Plake couldn't see a thing outside the tower. No one had seen the three speedboats approach in the night or the armed men climb aboard. He could barely make out the sound of footsteps heading toward him over the blare of machine-gun fire and explosions throughout the barge. Plake wanted to send out a flare, but was afraid he'd be shot if he opened a window.
Step two, thought Plake, as he radioed out to the armed security boat. Just as someone answered, a crowd of Nigerians with assault rifles kicked down the door and rushed into the control room.
The gunmen, dressed in red, white and black masks and camouflage pants, with chains of ammo draped across their bare chests, surrounded the four Americans. Someone jammed the point of a gun into the back of Plake's head, forcing his face into the floor. One of the men cracked Faller across the cheek with his fist.
"Stay down, stay down," Plake heard a man say in a deep voice. "We want your captain. Where is your captain?"
Refusing to give anyone up, Plake told the men that the captain should be waiting on the ship's deck. They shoved him and the others down a series of ladders and stairs toward the lifeboats as bullets whizzed by. No other crewmembers were in sight.
Of the Cheyenne's 11 armed guards, three had initially fought back but were wounded. The others, crewmembers later told Plake, tossed their guns overboard, tore off their security uniforms and scrambled to the belly of the ship to join the roughly 240 other crewmembers on board who had barricaded themselves inside their rooms. Only Plake, Roussel, Faller and Gay remained topside.
Minutes ticked by, and the gunmen were getting edgy. "Where is the captain?" they demanded over and over.
"Where is that damned security boat?" thought Plake.
Stalling for time, Plake insisted the captain should be there any moment. They waited as some of the attackers scavenged the ship for whatever they could snatch: cigarettes, ammo and binoculars. Plake didn't know that the security ship was anchored a mile and a half away and wouldn't get there for nearly another two hours.
"We can't find the captain," said a thick voice. "We're taking you."
They pushed the Americans toward the stern and then shoved them off the barge down into their speedboats. Plake and Faller were in one boat, Roussel and Gay in another. The speedboats peeled away from the barge, circling it while the kidnappers pumped more ammo into its sides. Then they raced after the ship that Plake had been able to warn over the radio.
Plake prayed that the guards aboard the support vessel wouldn't open fire on them. The chase, however, didn't last long, and Plake felt a moment of relief when the kidnappers stopped shooting and steered back toward shore.
The boats skimmed along the ocean's surface toward the mouth of a river heading inland. Fifteen Nigerians were piled onto three 18-foot-long fiberglass speedboats with V-shaped hulls. Giant twin 275-horsepower engines hung off the back of each boat.
"Maybe I should jump," thought Plake. But he couldn't bring himself to abandon his companions. Instead, he sat silently, wondering where they were going and what was going to happen once they got there.
The boats wound along the oil-slicked waterways deep into the jungle. The jostling vibration of the motors roaring at top speed through narrow creeks nearly drowned out all other sounds. Plake could barely hear the man holding a flashlight in the bow who barked directions to the driver.
One of the men offered Plake a pack of the stolen cigarettes. Another cleaned his rifle, tossing empty shells into a bucket of diesel. Occasionally they would stop so the driver could replace an empty gas tank. Sometimes the boats broke down, and they'd float in silence as the men made repairs. Then it was full-throttle again until one of the drivers would inevitably ram into a log or run aground, nearly tossing everyone from the boat.
Just before dawn, the boats pulled up to a makeshift dock along the riverbank. For the first time, Plake could hear the sounds of the jungle, all the birds, lizards and insects surrounding him. Then Plake heard drumming. "It's just like a King Kong movie," he thought, as he watched villagers dancing, shouting and shooting their guns in the air.
They marched Plake and the others at gunpoint up a path into the camp. A medicine man splashed water on their faces, a blessing, they were told, allowing them to enter. The kidnappers forced their captives onto a hand-carved wooden bench and began interrogating them. "Name? Rank? Why are you in Nigeria taking all of the jobs?"
From the moment he was captured on May 7, 2007, Plake both hoped and feared that his kidnappers were members of a well-known insurgency group called the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta, or MEND. For years, MEND had been kidnapping foreigners who worked for oil companies to use as leverage against Nigeria's corrupt government officials, who reputedly have been hoarding the billions of dollars the country makes from selling its crude instead of investing the profits in roads, schools or clean drinking water for its people. MEND was known as a ruthless, professional outfit, but most of its hostages eventually made it out alive.
As the interrogation continued, it became clear that Plake's kidnappers did not belong to MEND. These men said they belonged to the Niger-Delta Freedom Fighters, led by a rebel named Egbema One. They didn't necessarily want to make a political statement. They wanted money—more than $1 million per hostage.
Convinced that his company would never pay such a steep price, Plake closed his eyes and breathed deeply, thinking, "This is where I'm probably going to die."

----

Oil's been pumping through Plake's veins since the day he was born.
He grew up in Baytown, home to the largest refinery in the country, owned by ExxonMobil. His grandfather was an offshore legend, and his father rolled up his sleeves on some of the toughest jobs in the business in the North Sea. So it was pretty much expected that after Plake graduated from Ross S. Sterling High School, he would enter the family trade.
He worked offshore from ages 19 to 25, in seas all around the globe, off the coasts of India, South America and Malaysia. He worked for four years in Nigeria. One day in 1995, his back went out, and he had to come ashore.
By that point Plake had married 19-year-old Collette, whom he'd met in a local bar one night while he was home on leave. Collette, who the following year would give birth to their first daughter, Alyssa, was relieved to see her husband sidelined with a bad back. She missed him terribly on those long three-month stints and, much like a policeman's wife, lived in constant fear of that phone call at 3 in the morning.
Unlike many offshore oilmen who get itchy and long for the sea every time they touch land, Plake was OK with finding a new life. He had always been good with all things mechanical, earning him the nickname "MacGyver" among his friends, and enrolled in Baytown's Lee College, where he earned a degree in electronics. Plake next went to a specialty trade school in Watertown, Massachusetts, called the Ritop School for Mobile Electronics, where he learned to wire radios in exotic cars like Ferraris and Bentleys. With all his training, it didn't take Plake long to get a job in Deer Park, Texas, and start a new chapter.
But it wasn't easy. After 9/11, the economy seized up, and no one was spending money on luxury car radios. Plake bounced around for a while, eventually taking a job in Addison. But when the company hired too many radio installers, there wasn't enough work to go around, and Plake's paycheck once again nosedived. To support his family, which now included a second daughter, Jadyn, he delivered pizzas for Domino's, working for tips.
Late in 2006, the idea of again going offshore took hold of Plake. He was one week away from having his new home in McKinney put up for auction because he couldn't pay the mortgage, was working two jobs, never saw his wife and kids, and still couldn't make ends meet. He needed money, and fast.
"He came home one day," Collette says, "and said to me, 'Honey, I have no choice; I don't want to go back, but I have to.' He was crying for the first time in years."
(While giving interviews for this story, Plake and his wife were careful never to mention the name of the company he worked for, as per a legal agreement. The Houston Press, the Observer's sister paper, confirmed through news accounts and public records that Plake was working for Global Industries, which was doing contract work for Chevron. Global Industries did not return phone calls seeking comment.)
When Plake set off in March 2007 for the Cheyenne, both he and Collette went in with open eyes; they knew about the many assaults and kidnappings in the region where Plake was headed. For decades, as they understood it, corrupt Nigerian government officials had been pocketing more than their share of the country's oil revenues instead of investing them in developing the nation and helping their people.
According to University of Houston associate professor of history Kairn Klieman, who teaches classes about Africa including "Africa and the Oil Industry," the Nigerian government took control of the country's oil revenues following a civil war in the late 1960s. The government then purposefully left the Niger Delta region massively underdeveloped—no roads, electricity, clean water or jobs—hoping this would stave off any further attempts at revolution. Instead, people living there have suffered terribly, and vigilantism has become a way of life.
"Because the government was so greedy for oil revenues," Klieman says, "they let the oil companies work without following any kind of environmental regulations. So the land, the water, the air is all devastated, and the people there can't even live in the normal, old-fashioned way, which was to grow food. It's not even possible to live in the 19th-century model there anymore."
Nigeria ranks as the 121st most corrupt country in the world and is ranked No. 22 in Africa, according to the Corruption Perceptions Index published by Transparency International, a global corruption watchdog group. The country's score of 2.7 out of 10 in 2008 was an improvement over its score of 2.2 in 2007, the year Plake was taken hostage. By comparison, Somalia, which has made headlines this year for acts of piracy off its shores, was ranked as the 180th most corrupt country in the world in 2008 and came in at No. 47 in Africa.
According to Oyibos Online, a Web site that tracks security incidents in Nigeria, 62 foreigners have been kidnapped so far this year. In 2008, 81 were taken. In 2007, the year Plake was captured, 172 people were abducted. That's not to mention the hundreds of maritime assaults, hijackings and pipeline bombings over the same time span.
"You've heard of 'blood diamonds'?" Plake says. "In Nigeria they call it 'blood oil' because of all the deaths and kidnappings over it. They'll steal and kill their own brother because they're such a depressed people. Life is cheap."
Tribes and insurgency groups take hostages who work for the very oil companies that the government relies on to extract and move the country's vast reserves. Their stated political goal is to stop the country's ability to export oil and thus end the corruption, as well as to pressure the government to develop the region.
But nothing is ever so cut-and-dried. Motivations range from obtaining basic necessities to pure greed. Much of the environmental devastation is the result of insurgents blowing up pipelines to make their point and then attacking crews sent in to repair the damage. Many times the men will "bunker," or tap into, a pipeline to steal the oil—which they sell on the black market to pay for weapons and provisions—leaving a busted pipe spitting oil into the ground.
A central problem, Klieman says, is that the oil companies simply factor the cost of ransoms and hostage-rescue missions into the price of doing business, making the insurgents' efforts effectively moot.
Moot, that is, to everyone except the men who are taken hostage and their families.

----

Exhausted and in shock after being kidnapped and interrogated for most of the day, Plake, Roussel, Faller and Gay were searched and stripped of their wallets, watches, necklaces and cell phones. One of the militants demanded Plake give up his wedding ring, but Plake refused, insisting that his wife had put it on his finger and he'd be damned if it was coming off while he was still alive. Another villager stepped forward, telling Plake he could keep it because Plake was a Christian. By some miracle, they didn't find Plake's pocketknife, which he hid in his shoe.
That first night, the men were locked in a crudely fashioned thatched-roof hut with screen windows and walls made out of pegboard. Inside there was a table, a bench and a fan connected to a small generator stashed in the corner. A naked light bulb swinging from the ceiling burned brightly all night.
When the men were finally alone, panic set in. They knew the Nigerian military was afraid of venturing this deep into the jungle and that they might as well be trapped on an island. A thousand thoughts raced through Plake's mind, always ending with, "I think we're pretty much fucked."
Plake slept less than an hour that first night, next to Faller on one of two thin foam mattresses in the room.
The next day, on Tuesday, May 8, Plake woke up at 5 a.m. to beating drums and gunfire—a ritual that would continue throughout their captivity. A man unlocked the door and led the hostages to the side of the building, where each was given a plastic lawn chair to sit in all day. This became the daily routine.
That night, in McKinney, Collette was feeling anxious as she rushed through the front door of her suburban home. She had just picked up her daughters from gymnastics and had to get them fed, but all she could think about was that her husband was going to be mad at her. They had a standing appointment every night to talk on Skype, an Internet telephone service, and she was late. She tried to get online, but the connection wasn't working, so Collette walked upstairs to her bedroom to cool off. The phone rang.
Thinking it must be her husband, she headed back downstairs to pick up the main phone in the kitchen, but the answering machine beat her to it.
"I never caught their name," Collette says. "He just said, 'This is so-and-so from Larry's company,' and my heart sank because I knew."
Collette picked up the phone and listened as the man told her that Plake's barge had been attacked. No one knew if he'd been kidnapped, only that he was missing.
"I got so angry right there on the phone," Collette says. "I blamed them and said, 'You better find him and get him back! So help me God, if he dies over there, I'll own your company!'"
When she hung up, she turned and saw her two daughters staring at her. They had heard every word.
"Is Daddy dead?" asked 5-year-old Jadyn.
"No, baby," Collette answered, hugging them tight. "Right now the bad men with guns have Daddy. But we're going to get him back."
Collette is a no-nonsense woman with a sharp voice that could split a diamond. Furious at what had happened, she called everyone she knew—family, neighbors—telling them the news. Yet she was just as angry at herself for letting Plake go. Down deep she knew this would happen. It had only been a matter of time. She and Plake had been talking on Skype for weeks about how an increasing number of hostages were being taken. There had been several recent kidnappings in the same area where Plake was captured.
Collette did not sleep that night. Her sister drove up from Baytown and arrived around 4 a.m.
Amazingly enough, Plake called the house that afternoon, saying he was alive and in the middle of nowhere. He sounded frantic, but said he'd call again and then hung up. Collette felt relieved, but knew the hard part was still to come. She had to get him home.
That night, agents from the FBI showed up at her door. They tapped her phone, put a tracking device on it in case Plake called again and told her that if he did call, to let the FBI know before she told anyone else.
Collette says that when Global Industries found out about the FBI's request, they got upset. She says a company representative told her that if Plake or his captors contacted her again, she should call Global Industries first and the FBI after that. Collette says company officials told her that they didn't want anyone to interfere with their rescue efforts.
"I felt so stressed-out and conflicted," Collette says. "But the FBI explained to me that my husband was now a U.S. hostage because of the company, and there went my loyalty. Every time Larry called, I'd call the FBI first."
Global Industries officials also discouraged Collette from talking to the other three crewmembers' wives, threatened to cut off her home phone line if they thought she was trying to negotiate with the militants and forbade her to talk to the media, Collette says. The only news item she saw was on a CNN ticker that said four Americans had been taken off the Nigerian coast.
All of the additional pressure helped push Collette into a deep depression. Her mother and sister cared for the kids while Collette spent day and night in her living room. She didn't eat, losing 20 pounds. Plake would occasionally call, but as the days rolled by it felt like no one was making any progress. On Mother's Day, she received a bouquet of flowers from Plake that he had ordered online the day before he was kidnapped.

----

From the moment they arose each morning, Plake's kidnappers, wearing nothing but boxer shorts, started drinking, smoking dope, shooting their guns straight up in the air and arguing. They kept their marijuana in 50-pound rice sacks and would put what they didn't smoke into jars of moonshine made out of palm tree sap to ferment. Invariably drunk by noon, they'd gulp down this potent mix until they passed out at night, but not before a couple of the militants would typically get into a fight and go after each other with machetes or clubs.
In the humid afternoons, while Plake sat bored in his chair, many of his captors would play cards or huddle around a small television and watch the same five Rambo and Jean-Claude Van Damme films over and over.
Then it dawned on Plake, This isn't enjoyment for them, it's training. They think it's real. The men asked Plake how many people had died in the movies. He had to explain that it was just Hollywood.
There was bottled water to drink, but not much in the way of food. One morning the villagers tossed a chicken in a pot of water and boiled it all day. When it came time to eat, the meat was so rubbery and overcooked that Plake couldn't pull it off the bone. Another time they dug a trench and slaughtered a sickly goat. There was a cache of potted meat and canned tuna fish, which became Plake's meal, mixed with a sweet blend of rice and corn served daily at 4 p.m. After several weeks, Plake convinced his captives to push dinnertime back so that he could avoid the hordes of flies that would swarm around his plate, preferring to eat amid the mosquitoes that came out at night.
Before bed, Plake stripped off his filthy jeans down to his boxers to stay cool. His fair-skinned body, peppered with swollen red bug bites, became a testament to jungle living.
Some of the villagers bathed in the polluted river; Plake did not. He had a spider bite on his left ankle that was oozing pus and he wasn't about to dip it in the same water that the entire village used as a toilet. Instead, he just rubbed soap under his arms and apologized for his stench. Nor would Plake shave with the razors used by the militants for fear of getting AIDS. At one point, his white moustache flopped down over his bottom lip.
At night, the Americans would stay up late plotting their escape, hatching scenario after scenario. One had Plake taking out a guard with his pocketknife while the other men grabbed his gun. "But what then?" Plake thought. "What if we do take the camp over? We've got to motor out. But what if we run into them on the river? We don't know where to go anyway. Plus they have lookouts along the creek in crow's nests with machine guns. We'd be sitting ducks."
Plake started giving his kidnappers nicknames such as "Mike the Administrator," "Ben the Weapons Expert" and "Bubba the Explosives Guy." Many of them told Plake they dreamed of one day going to the United States to be criminals there. They wanted to rob banks and get rich, and they all seemed to admire Osama bin Laden. When Plake told them that the al-Qaida leader had killed innocent people during 9/11, they didn't seem to care. They felt he was a hero for standing up against America.
Over time, Plake got to know "Sonny the Cook," who was in charge of making sure the hostages had food, bottled water and cigarettes. Sonny told Plake that all he really wanted was to open a restaurant in the United States. Plake began to sympathize with his captors. While taking hostages wasn't the way to go about it, he understood why they were fighting their government for basic rights. All this oil money was pouring into the country, yet their government treated them like animals.
The leader of the Niger-Delta Freedom Fighters was called Egbema One. He told Plake he was a prince and had once worked offshore as a ballast control engineer. He wanted to use the hostages as political leverage, but it soon became clear to Plake that Egbema One was in the minority. Everyone else just wanted cash. And when Egbema One left the camp to get supplies, tensions would rise. The militants would force Plake to use a prepaid cell phone with a bamboo-and-wire antenna to phone Global Industries, his wife or Nigerian politicians, demanding the ransom.
"Tell them to send the money now!" the militants shouted in Plake's face. "We're gonna kill you tomorrow if we don't get the money!"
The men cracked the side of their rifles against the back of Plake's neck and threatened him constantly. One of the larger men repeatedly said he was going to cut off Plake's pinky finger and send it to Plake's employer to prove he wasn't playing around. Then he'd laugh in Plake's face. The bomb-maker told Plake he'd never get out alive, and that he'd made a special explosive for Plake if it ever looked like the Texan was going to be released.
The kidnappers set up a bench about 50 yards into the jungle, hidden from the camp. Every time they heard a noise, be it a voice, a boat or the snap of a twig, they'd grab the hostages and hurriedly beat them like horses toward the clearing, where they'd wait until whatever it was had passed. After just a few times, the men learned to race over to the spot themselves whenever they heard something, day or night. The kidnappers told Plake that if anyone tried to rescue them, they'd execute the hostages before returning to defend the village. This happened as many as 10 times a day.

----

Hostage negotiations seemed to be going nowhere.
One of the phone numbers Plake had to contact Global Industries had been disconnected. When he dialed the company's main switchboard, Plake says, a company operator couldn't hear him, cursed at Plake and refused to patch him through. The kidnappers had Plake call the president of Nigeria, but his secretary would have nothing to do with them. The prepaid phone credits would always run out in the middle of conversations. The militants, just for the hell of it, once set off a bomb behind Plake while he was on the phone, knocking down the bamboo antenna. Disgusted, Plake stormed back toward his plastic chair, knocking over a table of automatic rifles.
"This is like working with children," Plake thought.
At home in McKinney, Collette was just as frustrated.
"I got so that I was losing my mind because it kept dragging on and on," she says. "I kept thinking, 'I can't bear to wake up another day and sit in my house all day long'...I felt so helpless. It was like I was a hostage in my own prison camp."
As the days slogged on, Plake suffered mood swings. There were moments of peacefulness, when Plake would sit in his plastic chair twisting his wedding ring around his finger for hours at a time, picturing taking his wife and daughters bowling. He took comfort knowing he had a will, and they would be taken care of if he died. The hostages relied heavily on each other. When Plake lost it, they'd calm him down. When one of the others cried, prompting the militants to laugh, Plake would stand up and say, "Just because he's crying doesn't mean he's not a man."
There were also days when Plake felt resigned and became aggressive. If the kidnappers didn't kill him, he thought, then someone or something else would. He was sick of the abuse and the false threats to blow him up or slice off his finger.
"There's no way I'm spending six months here," he told his captors. "You'll have to kill me."
He clutched his knife like a security blanket. He knew he'd never get out alive, but thought, "God, give me a sign to let me know it's go time. I'll send a few of these guys to hell before they send me to heaven."
But he never got the chance. "Gunboat Sunday" intervened.
During the weeks of negotiations, members of MEND had discovered that the Niger-Delta Freedom Fighters had kidnapped the Americans and were demanding a huge ransom. This rubbed them the wrong way. MEND believed hostages were to be used to achieve political leverage against the corrupt government, not for individual gain. They decided to teach this small band of extortionists a lesson.
On Sunday, May 27, 2007, MEND staged a rescue mission. As MEND's boats neared the shore, Plake's kidnappers started whooping, shrieking and firing their guns. Someone grabbed the hostages and pushed them toward the river, telling them they were being placed in the middle of the battle. That way, the man said, bullets from MEND would kill them and their deaths would not be the kidnappers' fault.
As Plake ducked and tried to crawl out of the way, the MEND boats retreated. They saw what was happening with the hostages and never fired a shot, disappearing as abruptly as they had arrived.
Plake and the other three hostages ran back to their room and locked the door. A moment later, a muscular, 6-foot-tall man named Jean-Paul kicked it down and pointed a gun at them. Plake thought he was dead for sure, but suddenly a group of villagers tackled Jean-Paul and wrestled the weapon away from him. With MEND closing down on the camp, the hostages were now more of a liability than ever. Many villagers, like Jean-Paul, simply wanted to get rid of them to save their own hides.
After the commotion died down, the insurgents let the hostages use the phone. Plake called his parents and then Collette to say his final goodbyes.
"There are some things going down over here, and it doesn't look good," he calmly told his wife, who was crying on the other end. "The chances of me coming home are pretty slim. Take good care of the kids. I've always loved you."
The next morning, members of MEND and tribal elders from a nearby village visited the camp and met with Egbema One all day. At one point, Sonny said to Plake in pidgin English, "Maybe you go home today. They talking serious." Plake refused to believe it. He didn't trust anyone. But that evening, the hostages were told to pack up; they were heading out.
Egbema One escorted the hostages by boat to the nearby village. There, Plake saw a sack of money change hands. Egbema One then took Plake's wrist and placed it in the hand of an elderly man named Good Luck, who walked with a cane and wore flowing white clothes.
"You belong to me now," Good Luck said. "You'll be leaving soon."
Leaving Egbema One and the Freedom Fighters behind, the hostages and members of MEND piled into another boat and began motoring toward the MEND camp. Plake wasn't convinced he'd be set free, but was hoping the new camp would at least be a little better. They snaked along the river for more than six hours. Occasionally the driver would tell Plake not to smoke because there was so much oil in the water. The members of MEND ridiculed the Freedom Fighters, calling them "little boys" and "dogs."
Finally, the boat pulled up to the MEND village. Just as when he first arrived at the Freedom Fighters' camp 21 days earlier, medicine men splashed water on Plake, blessing him as he entered. He was marched into a concrete building with rocket-propelled grenades and AK-47s stacked against the wall and told that a helicopter would get him in the morning. It was like entering a military barracks after spending weeks at a Boy Scout camp.
Plake didn't sleep much that night. The morning came and went. No chopper. "Maybe at noon," a MEND soldier said. Still no helicopter. Plake just figured this was yet another lie and he was screwed. Then, at about 6 p.m. Plake and the other hostages were loaded onto a boat.
They cruised along the water in silence. The canal was getting wider and wider, spanning more than 100 feet across. In the middle of the river, the driver suddenly cut the engine. Plake looked around, thinking: "This is it. They're going to kill us now and dump the bodies."
Plake watched as the driver's hand slowly disappeared into his coat pocket. Plake reached for his knife. Then he saw the man's hand emerge; he was holding a cell phone.
"We've got them," the man said into the speaker.
Before he knew it, Plake was stepping out of the boat and onto a dock near Warri, a major city in the Niger Delta, where a car whisked him off to the governor's house to meet up with Global executives and FBI agents who were waiting. From there, he flew to Lagos and then to London to see a tropical disease expert.
After 22 days, Plake, Faller, Roussel and Gay were finally free.

----

Collette had just returned home from a rare trip to McDonald's with the kids when the phone rang. It was someone from Global Industries.
"We've got him," said the voice.
The next day she was on a flight to London.
Because of convoluted English insurance laws, Plake and the other men were not allowed into the tropical disease center. Instead, they went to an urgent-care clinic. Other than the nasty spider bite, Plake checked out OK. Two of the other men had intestinal parasites and had to remain there a little longer that day. But not Plake; he was ready to go. For the past 48 hours, he'd been shuttled across two continents, poked and prodded by doctors, forced to do press interviews with the African media and listen to Global Industries officials tell him to keep quiet about everything that had happened. All he wanted to do was to see his wife.
Collette was sleeping when Plake finally made it back to the couple's London hotel room. His electronic key, though, had been accidentally knocked offline when Collette checked in earlier that day. He couldn't unlock the door. He started banging and hollering, but Collette didn't answer. Finally, Collette heard the knocking and ran to the door. When it swung open, she leapt into Plake's arms.
"You couldn't peel me off of him," she says.
That night, the four men and their wives celebrated, getting drunk at a nearby pub. They laughed and kidded each other about which movie stars would play them if their story ever made it to the big screen. Plake claimed fellow East Texan Matthew McConaughey. But the smiles wouldn't last long.
Back in McKinney, Plake was not readjusting well to normal life. For months he didn't want to talk about being kidnapped. He had nightmares. Sometimes he thought he'd heard footsteps and was ready to run over to the clearing in the jungle to hide. Other times he dreamed of being under attack on the barge, but this time he had a gun and fought back. He'd wake up lathered in sweat.
Plake saw a couple psychologists, but they didn't seem to help. He even checked himself into a mental hospital for a week. Time seemed to be the only cure. Plake had surgery on his spine in late 2008 to repair two discs that had been ruptured by repeated blows to the neck with rifles.
He now suffers migraines so bad that his vision is blurred and he throws up. He takes a long list of medications, including pills to fight depression, anxiety and pain.
Plake says he doesn't trust anyone anymore, no longer has a short-term memory and has developed a dangerously short fuse. He's caught himself yelling at his kids over dumb stuff such as eating an ice cream cone that he'd forgotten he himself had given them. He refuses to sit in plastic chairs and doesn't shave. It's taken him two years to start working again. He recently bought a property nearby that he's renovating and hoping to flip for a profit.
"Larry never regretted going back offshore," Collette says, "because he saved our home from being sold out from under us. But it's something he'll never get over. He just has to learn to live with it. It redefines who you are."
Plake still keeps up with Faller, Roussel and Gay. Scattered across Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi, they couldn't get together for a second anniversary at the end of May. When they talk on the phone, they almost never mention what happened. They stick to what's going on now in their lives, their jobs and their kids. Plake says he's never going back offshore. Some of the others are considering it, he says, but no farther away than the Gulf of Mexico. The money is still as good as it's ever been.
For a long time, Plake would search the Internet every morning for news of Egbema One or MEND. Not anymore.
Earlier this year, Nigerian President Umaru Yar'Adua granted amnesty to a host of militants in the Niger Delta. According to Vanguard, a news publication covering the country, Egbema One was on the amnesty list. Yar'Adua has also reportedly directed his government to step up its efforts to rebuild and develop the region. But still, the violence only seems to increase. MEND has recently taken credit for a rash of pipeline bombings against Shell and Chevron, propelling Chevron to evacuate hundreds of employees from the area, according to The Christian Science Monitor. The group continues to wage attacks against the oil companies, claiming that amnesty is not enough to solve the long-standing problems.
The irony of it all is not lost on Plake.
"The group I had heard about and was most afraid of, MEND, were the ones who ended up rescuing us," he says. "I've been told it never happened before or ever since. I understand their plight more now and the reason why they do all this. I'm very appreciative because no one else was coming to get us. But the bottom line is that I got out. I'm here now, and I'm staying put."

Airline Fees

Fees have mounted from U.S. airline companies over the past few years. Here are some of the most common charges -- for one-way flights -- passengers can expect to pay.

	AirTran	American	Continental	Delta	Frontier	jetBlue	Midwest	Spirit	Southwest	United	US Airways
First bag	$15	$15	$15	$15	Economy ticket: $15 Other ticket types: Free	Free	$15	Online: $19 Airport: $25	Free	Online: $15 Airport: $20	Online: $15 Airport: $20
Second bag	$25	$25	$25	$25	Economy ticket: $25 Other ticket types: Free	$30	$25	Online and airport: $25	Free	Online: $25 Airport: $30	Online: $25 Airport: $30
Seat selection	$6 for an assigned seat on sale fares Exit row: $20	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A	Extra leg room: $10	N/A	Exit row: $15 Aisle: $10 Middle: $5	N/A	Extra leg room starting at $14	Aisle and window seats starting at $5
Wi-fi	Starting at $9.95 for lap tops; $7.95 for mobile devices	Starting at $9.95 for lap tops; $7.95 for mobile devices	Free in first class; $6 in economy class (selected aircraft)	Starting at $9.95 for lap tops; $7.95 for mobile devices	No wireless	Limited trial access on select aircraft	No wireless	No wireless	Limited trial access on select aircraft	No wireless	No wireless
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The World's Biggest Diamond Heist

The Untold Story of the World's Biggest Diamond Heist

By Joshua Davis 03.12.09

The scene of the crime: The Diamond District, Antwerp, Belgium.
Photo: Nick Waplington

Leonardo Notarbartolo strolls into the prison visiting room trailing a guard as if the guy were his personal assistant. The other convicts in this eastern Belgian prison turn to look. Notarbartolo nods and smiles faintly, the laugh lines crinkling around his blue eyes. Though he's an inmate and wears the requisite white prisoner jacket, Notarbartolo radiates a sunny Italian charm. A silver Rolex peeks out from under his cuff, and a vertical strip of white soul patch drops down from his lower lip like an exclamation mark.
In February 2003, Notarbartolo was arrested for heading a ring of Italian thieves. They were accused of breaking into a vault two floors beneath the Antwerp Diamond Center and making off with at least $100 million worth of loose diamonds, gold, jewelry, and other spoils. The vault was thought to be impenetrable. It was protected by 10 layers of security, including infrared heat detectors, Doppler radar, a magnetic field, a seismic sensor, and a lock with 100 million possible combinations. The robbery was called the heist of the century, and even now the police can't explain exactly how it was done.
The loot was never found, but based on circumstantial evidence, Notarbartolo was sentenced to 10 years. He has always denied having anything to do with the crime and has refused to discuss his case with journalists, preferring to remain silent for the past six years.
Until now.
Notarbartolo sits down across from me at one of the visiting room's two dozen small rectangular tables. He has an intimidating reputation. The Italian anti-Mafia police contend he is tied to the Sicilian mob, that his cousin was tapped to be the next capo dei capi—the head of the entire organization. Notarbartolo intends to set the record straight. He puts his hands on the table. He has had six years to think about what he is about to say.
"I may be a thief and a liar," he says in beguiling Italian-accented French. "But I am going to tell you a true story."
It was February 16, 2003 — a clear, frozen Sunday evening in Belgium. Notarbartolo took the E19 motorway out of Antwerp. In the passenger seat, a man known as Speedy fidgeted nervously, damp with sweat. Notarbartolo punched it, and his rented Peugeot 307 sped south toward Brussels. They hadn't slept in two days.
Speedy scanned the traffic behind them in the side-view mirror and maintained a tense silence. Notarbartolo had worked with him for 30 years—they were childhood buddies—but he knew that his friend had a habit of coming apart at the end of a job. The others on the team hadn't wanted Speedy in on this one—they said he was a liability. Notarbartolo could see their point, but out of loyalty, he defended his friend. Speedy could handle it, he said.
And he had. They had executed the plan perfectly: no alarms, no police, no problems. The heist wouldn't be discovered until guards checked the vault on Monday morning. The rest of the team was already driving back to Italy with the gems. They'd rendezvous outside Milan to divvy it all up. There was no reason to worry. Notarbartolo and Speedy just had to burn the incriminating evidence sitting in a garbage bag in the backseat.

They were accused of breaking into the Antwerp Diamond Center’s supersecure vault and stealing $100 million in diamonds, gold and jewelry. The loot was never found, but their trash was.

For more, visit wired.com/video.

Notarbartolo pulled off the highway and turned onto a dirt road that led into a dense thicket. The spot wasn't visible from the highway, though the headlights of passing cars fractured through the trees. Notarbartolo told Speedy to stay put and got out to scout the area.
He passed a rusty, dilapidated gate that looked like it hadn't been touched since the Second World War. It was hard to see in the dark, but the spot seemed abandoned. He decided to burn the stuff near a shed beside a small pond and headed back to the car.
When he got there, he couldn't believe what he was seeing. Speedy had lost it. The contents of the garbage bag was strewn amongst the trees. Speedy was stomping through the mud, hurling paper into the underbrush. Spools of videotape clung to the branches like streamers on a Christmas tree. Israeli and Indian currency skittered past a half-eaten salami sandwich. The mud around the car was flecked with dozens of tiny, glittering diamonds. It would take hours to gather everything up and burn it.
"I think someone's coming," Speedy said, looking panicked.
Notarbartolo glared at him. The forest was quiet except for the occasional sound of a car or truck on the highway. It was even possible to hear the faint gurgling of a small stream. Speedy was breathing fast and shallow—the man was clearly in the midst of a full-blown panic attack.
"Get back in the car," Notarbartolo ordered. They were leaving. Nobody would ever find the stuff here.
The job was done.

Location along the E19 motorway north of Brussels where Speedy dumped the garbage bag of evidence.

Patrick Peys and Agim De Bruycker arrived at the Diamond Center the next morning. They had just received a frantic call: The vault had been compromised. The subterranean chamber was supposed to be one of the most secure safes in the world. Now the foot-thick steel door was ajar, and more than 100 of the 189 safe-deposit boxes had been busted open. Peys and De Bruycker were stunned. The floor was strewn with wads of cash and velvet-lined boxes. Peys stepped on a diamond-encrusted bracelet. It appeared that the thieves had so much loot, they simply couldn't carry it all away.
Peys and De Bruycker lead the Diamond Squad, the world's only specialized diamond police. Their beat: the labyrinthine Antwerp Diamond District. Eighty percent of the world's rough diamonds pass through this three-square-block area, which is under 24-hour police surveillance and monitored by 63 video cameras. About $3 billion worth of gem sales were reported here in 2003, but that's not counting a hidden world of handshake deals and off-ledger transactions. Business relationships follow the ancient family and religious traditions of the district's dominant Jewish and Indian dealers, known as diamantaires. In 2000, the Belgian government realized it would require a special type of cop to keep an eye on things and formed the squad. Peys and De Bruycker were the first hires.
De Bruycker called headquarters, asking for a nationwide alert: The Antwerp Diamond Center had been brazenly robbed. Then he dialed Securilink, the vault's alarm company.
"What is the status of the alarm?" he asked.
"Fully functional," the operator said, checking the signals coming in from the Diamond Center. "The vault is secure."
"Then how is it that the door is wide open and I'm standing inside the vault?" De Bruycker demanded, glancing at the devastation all around him.
He hung up and looked at Peys. They were up against a rare breed of criminal.

The Diamond Center's vault after the robbery.

About 18 months earlier, in the summer of 2001, Leonardo Notarbartolo sipped an espresso at a café on Hoveniersstraat, the diamond district's main street. It was a cramped, narrow place with a half-dozen small tables, but from the corner by the window Notarbartolo could look out on the epicenter of the world's diamond trade. During business hours, Hasidic men wearing broad-brimmed hats hurried past with satchels locked to their wrists. Armored cars idled tensely while burly couriers with handguns wheeled away small black suitcases. There were Africans in bright blue suits, Indian merchants wearing loupes around their necks, and bald Armenians with reading glasses pushed up on their mottled heads.
Billions of dollars in diamonds pass by the café's window. During the day, they travel from office to office in briefcases, coat pockets, and off-the-shelf rollies. At night, all those gems are locked up in safes and underground vaults. It's one of the densest concentrations of wealth in the world.
It's also a thief's paradise. In 2000, Notarbartolo rented a small office in the Diamond Center, one of the area's largest buildings. He presented himself as a gem importer based in Turin, Italy, and scheduled meetings with numerous dealers. He bought small stones, paid cash, dressed well, and cheerfully mangled the French language. The dealers probably never knew that they had just welcomed one of the world's best jewel thieves into their circle.
By his own account, Notarbartolo had pulled off dozens of major robberies by 2000. It wasn't just about the money anymore. He stole because he was born to be a thief. He still remembers every detail of his first robbery. It was 1958—he was 6. His mother had sent him out for milk, and he came back with 5,000 lira—about $8. The milkman had been asleep, and young Leo rifled through his drawers. His mother beat him, but it didn't matter. He had found his calling.
In elementary school, he filched money from his teachers. As a teenager, he stole cars and learned to pick locks. In his twenties, he devoted himself to the study of people, tracking jewelry salesmen around Italy for weeks just to understand their habits. In his thirties, he began to assemble teams of thieves, each with their own specialty. He knew lock-picking experts, alarm aces, safecrackers, guys who could tunnel under anything, and a man who could scale the sleek exteriors of office buildings. Each job brought a different mix of thieves into play. Most, including Notarbartolo, lived in or near Turin, and the group came to be known as the School of Turin.
Notarbartolo's specialty was charm. Acting the part of the jolly jeweler, he was invited into offices, workshops, and even vault rooms to inspect merchandise. He would buy a few stones and then, a week or a month later, steal the target's entire stock in the middle of the night.
Antwerp provided a wealth of opportunity and a good place to fence hot property. A diamond necklace stolen in Italy could be dismantled and its individual gems sold for cash in Antwerp. He came to town about twice a month, stayed a few days at a small apartment near the Diamond District, then drove home to his wife and kids in the foothills of the Alps.
When he had stolen goods to sell, he dealt with only a few trusted buyers. Now, as he finished his espresso, one of them—a Jewish dealer—came in and sat down to chat.
"Actually, I want to talk to you about something a little unusual," the dealer said casually. "Maybe we could walk a little?"
They headed out, and once they were clear of the district, the dealer picked up the conversation. His tone had changed however. The casualness was gone.
"I'd like to hire you for a robbery," he said. "A big robbery."
The agreement was straightforward. For an initial payment of 100,000 euros, Notarbartolo would answer a simple question: Could the vault in the Antwerp Diamond Center be robbed?
He was pretty sure the answer was no. He was a tenant in the building and rented a safe-deposit box in the vault to secure his own stash. He viewed it as the safest place to keep valuables in Antwerp. But for 100,000 euros, he was happy to photograph the place and show the dealer how daunting it really was.
So he strolled into the Diamond District with a pen poking out of his breast pocket. At a glance, it looked like a simple highlighter, but the cap contained a miniaturized digital camera capable of storing 100 high-resolution images. Photography is strictly limited in the district, but nobody noticed Notarbartolo's pencam.
He began his reconnaissance at the police surveillance booth on the Schupstraat, a street leading into the center of the district. Behind the booth's bulletproof glass, two officers monitored the area. The three main blocks of the district bristled with video cameras: Every inch of street and sky appeared to be under watch. The booth also contained the controls for the retractable steel cylinders that are deployed to prevent vehicular access to the district. As Notarbartolo walked past, he began taking pictures.
He headed toward the Diamond Center itself, a gray, 14-story, fortresslike building on the south end of the district. It had a private security force that operated a nerve center located at the entrance. Access was blocked by metal turnstiles, and visitors were questioned by guards. Notarbartolo flashed his tenant ID card and breezed through. His camera captured crisp images of everything.

The 3-ton steel vault door.

He took the elevator, descending two floors underground to a small, claustrophobic room—the vault antechamber. A 3-ton steel vault door dominated the far wall. It alone had six layers of security. There was a combination wheel with numbers from 0 to 99. To enter, four numbers had to be dialed, and the digits could be seen only through a small lens on the top of the wheel. There were 100 million possible combinations.
Power tools wouldn't do the trick. The door was rated to withstand 12 hours of nonstop drilling. Of course, the first vibrations of a drill bit would set off the embedded seismic alarm anyway.
The door was monitored by a pair of abutting metal plates, one on the door itself and one on the wall just to the right. When armed, the plates formed a magnetic field. If the door were opened, the field would break, triggering an alarm. To disarm the field, a code had to be typed into a nearby keypad. Finally, the lock required an almost-impossible-to-duplicate foot-long key.
During business hours, the door was actually left open, leaving only a steel grate to prevent access. But Notarbartolo had no intention of muscling his way in when people were around and then shooting his way out. Any break-in would have to be done at night, after the guards had locked down the vault, emptied the building, and shuttered the entrances with steel roll-gates. During those quiet midnight hours, nobody patrolled the interior—the guards trusted their technological defenses.
Notarbartolo pressed a buzzer on the steel grate. A guard upstairs glanced at the videofeed, recognized Notarbartolo, and remotely unlocked the steel grate. Notarbartolo stepped inside the vault.
It was silent—he was surrounded by thick concrete walls. The place was outfitted with motion, heat, and light detectors. A security camera transmitted his movements to the guard station, and the feed was recorded on videotape. The safe-deposit boxes themselves were made of steel and copper and required a key and combination to open. Each box had 17,576 possible combinations.
Notarbartolo went through the motions of opening and closing his box and then walked out. The vault was one of the hardest targets he'd ever seen.
Notarbartolo leans toward me in the Belgian prison and asks if I have any questions so far. It is a rare break in his fast-moving monologue. There is a sense of urgency. He is allotted only one hour of visiting time per day.
"You're telling me that the heist was organized by an Antwerp diamond dealer," I say.
"Bravo," he replies, smiling.
"What about your cousin?"
His smile disappears.
Notarbartolo was born in Palermo, Sicily, and members of his extended family have long been dogged by accusations of Mafia connections. Those accusations reached a crescendo last year when anti-Mafia police arrested Notarbartolo's cousin Benedetto Capizzi, claiming he was about to become the new leader of the Sicilian Mafia. Notarbartolo says the Italian authorities traveled to Belgium soon after the heist to question him about Capizzi's possible role in the robbery. If there is an organized-crime link, Notarbartolo might be inventing a story about the Jewish diamond dealer to distract attention from what really happened.
Notarbartolo scoffs at this idea and insists that his cousin had nothing to do with the heist. The reality, Notarbartolo says, is that he thought the vault was impregnable. He didn't believe it could be robbed until the dealer went to extraordinary lengths to prove him wrong.

The Target

The Antwerp Diamond Center vault was protected by 10 layers of security.

The Door 1.    Combination dial (0-99) 2.    Keyed lock 3.    Seismic sensor (built-in) 4.    Locked steel grate 5.    Magnetic sensor 6.    External security camera

The Vault 7.    Keypad for disarming sensors 8.    Light sensor 9.    Internal security camera 10.  Heat/motion sensor (approximate location)

Illustration: Joe McKendry

It took five months for the diamond dealer to call back after Notarbartolo told him the heist was impossible. He had even given him the photographs to prove it. Notarbartolo thought that would be the end of it, but now the dealer wanted to meet at an address outside Antwerp. When Notarbartolo arrived, the dealer was waiting for him in front of an abandoned warehouse.
"I want to introduce you to some people," he said, unlocking the battered front door.
Inside, a massive structure was covered with black plastic tarps. The dealer pulled back a corner and they ducked underneath.
At first, Notarbartolo was confused. He seemed to be standing in the vault antechamber. To his left, he saw the vault door. He was inside an exact replica of the Diamond Center's vault level. Everything was the same. As far as Notarbartolo could tell, the dealer had reconstructed it based on the photographs he had provided. Notarbartolo felt like he had stepped into a movie.
Inside the fake vault, three Italians were having a quiet conversation. They stopped talking when they saw the dealer and Notarbartolo. The dealer introduced them, though Notarbartolo refuses to reveal their names, referring to them only by nicknames.
The Genius specialized in alarm systems. According to the dealer, he could disable any kind of alarm.
"You can disable this?" Notarbartolo asked, pointing at the replica vault.
"I can disable most of it," the Genius said with a smile. "You're going to have to do one or two things yourself, though."
The tall, muscular man was the Monster. He was called that because he was monstrously good at everything he did. He was an expert lock picker, electrician, mechanic, and driver and had enormous physical strength. Everybody was a little scared of him, which was another reason for the nickname.
The King of Keys was a quiet older man. His age set him apart from the others—he looked like somebody's grandfather. The diamond dealer said that the wizened locksmith was among the best key forgers in the world. One of his contributions would be to duplicate the nearly impossible-to-duplicate foot-long vault key.
"Just get me a clear video of it," the man told Notarbartolo. "I'll do the rest."
"That's not so easy," Notarbartolo pointed out.
The King of Keys shrugged. That wasn't his problem.
"Don't worry," the Genius said. "I'll help."
In September 2002, a guard stepped up to the vault door and began to spin the combination wheel. It was 7 am. He was right on schedule.
Directly above his head and invisible behind the glare of a recessed light, a fingertip-sized video camera captured his every move. With each spin, the combination came to rest on a number. A small antenna broadcast the image. Nearby, in a storage room beside the vault, an ordinary-looking red fire extinguisher was strapped to the wall. The extinguisher was fully functional, but a watertight compartment inside housed electronics that picked up and recorded the video signal.
When the guard finished dialing the combination, he inserted the vault's key. The video camera recorded a sharp image of it before it disappeared inside the keyhole.
He spun the handle, and the vault door swung open.
Thursday morning, February 13, 2003. Two days before the heist. The thud-thud-thud of a police helicopter beat over a convoy of police cars escorting an armored truck through the heart of Antwerp. They blew past posters of Venus Williams—she was due in town to compete in the Proximus Diamond Games tennis tournament.
The escorts bristled with firepower. They belonged to a special diamond-delivery protection unit, and each cop carried a fully automatic weapon. Their cargo: De Beers' monthly shipment of diamonds, worth millions.
De Beers is the world's largest diamond-mining company. In 2003, it controlled 55 percent of the global diamond supply and operated mines in South Africa, Namibia, and Botswana, among others. The rough, unpolished gems were flown to London, where they were divided and placed in 120 boxes—one for each official De Beers distributor, many of which were headquartered in Antwerp.
Every month, Antwerp's share of the boxes was flown into Belgium and transferred to a Brinks armored truck. Once the truck's doors slammed shut, the convoy sped away, sirens wailing. The vehicles rocketed past the guard gate at the entrance of the district, and the giant metal cylinders rose out of the ground behind them, blocking any further automotive access.
The armed escorts fanned out on foot around the armored truck to form a perimeter. No one was allowed near the vehicle. The doors swung open, and the boxes were quickly carried through an unremarkable entrance in the middle of the block. It was payday. The Diamond District was flush.
Notarbartolo was buzzed into the vault the next day, Friday, February 14—the day before the robbery. He was alone. In his jacket pocket, he carried a can of women's hair spray.

Notarbartolo used women's hair spray to temporarily disable the vault's combined heat/motion sensor.

A security camera recorded his movements—police would later watch the footage—but the guard had gotten used to the Italian's frequent visits and wasn't paying attention. Notarbartolo stepped away from the safe-deposit boxes and pulled out the aerosol can. With a quick, practiced circular movement, he covered the combined heat/motion sensor with a thin coat of transparent, oily mist.
The vault was momentarily filled with the smell of a woman's hair.
It was a simple but effective hack: The oily film would temporarily insulate the sensor from fluctuations in the room's temperature, and the alarm went off only if it sensed both heat and motion.
Still, it was hard to guess how long the trick would work. Once the Monster was in the vault, he had to install the sensor bypass before his body heat penetrated the film. He might have five minutes—he might have less. Nobody knew for sure.

The path Notarbartolo's team took to enter the Diamond Center.

Venus Williams smashed the ball crosscourt with a yelp, overwhelming her leggy Slovakian opponent. It was Saturday night, and Williams was dominating the semifinals of the Diamond Games, an event that hyped Antwerp's predominant position in the gem world. Many of the city's diamantaires watched as Williams beat down the Slovak and moved one step closer to winning a tennis racket encrusted with nearly $1 million worth of stones.
Across town, the Diamond District was deserted. Notarbartolo drove his rented gray Peugeot 307 past the city's soot-covered central train station and turned onto Pelikaanstraat, a road that skirted the district. He pulled to the curb, and the Monster, the Genius, the King of Keys, and Speedy stepped out carrying large duffel bags. The King of Keys picked the lock on a run-down office building, and they disappeared through the door. It was a little past midnight.
The Genius led them out the rear of the building into a private garden that abutted the back of the Diamond Center. It was one of the few places in the district that wasn't under video surveillance. Using a ladder he had previously hidden there, the Genius climbed up to a small terrace on the second floor. A heat-sensing infrared detector monitored the terrace, but he approached it slowly from behind a large, homemade polyester shield. The low thermal conductivity of the polyester blocked his body heat from reaching the sensor. He placed the shield directly in front of the detector, preventing it from sensing anything.
The balcony was now safe. While the rest of the team scrambled up, the Genius disabled an alarm sensor on one of the balcony's windows. One by one, the thieves climbed through the window, dropped into a stairwell, and descended to the darkened vault antechamber. They covered the security cameras with black plastic bags and flipped on the lights. The vault door stood imposingly before them. The building was quiet—no alarms had been triggered. The police never determined how the men had entered the building.
The Genius pulled a custom-made slab of rigid aluminum out of his bag and affixed heavy-duty double-sided tape to one side. He stuck it on the two plates that regulated the magnetic field on the right side of the vault door and unscrewed their bolts. The magnetic plates were now loose, but the sticky aluminum held them together, allowing the Genius to pivot them out of the way and tape them to the antechamber wall. The plates were still side by side and active—the magnetic field never wavered—but they no longer monitored the door. Some 30 hours later, the authorities would marvel at the ingenuity.

The Genius used this custom-made slab of aluminum to reposition the magnetic field away from the vault door.

Next, the King of Keys played out a hunch. In Notarbartolo's videos, the guard usually visited a utility room just before opening the vault. When the thieves searched the room, they found a major security lapse: The original vault key was hanging inside.
The King of Keys grabbed the original. There was no point in letting the safe manufacturers know that their precious key could be copied, and the police still don't know that a duplicate was made.
The King of Keys slotted the original in the keyhole and waited while the Genius dialed in the combination they had gleaned from the video. A moment later, the Genius nodded. The Monster turned off the lights—they didn't want to trigger the light detector in the vault when the door opened. In the darkness, the King of Keys turned the key and spun a four-pronged handle. The bolts that secured the door retracted and it swung heavily open.
Speedy ran up the stairwell. It was his job to stay in touch with Notarbartolo, but there was no cell phone reception down in the vault. Upstairs, he got a signal and dialed his old friend.
"We're in," he said and hung up.
Notarbartolo put his phone back on the dashboard. He was sitting in the Peugeot and could see the front of the Diamond Center a block and a half away. His police scanner was quiet. He took a sip of cold coffee and waited.
In the antechamber, the King of Keys deftly picked the lock on the metal grate. He shuffled backward as the Monster propped the grate open with two cans of paint he found in the storeroom. Like the rest of the team, the Monster wore plastic gloves—the police would find no prints on the cans. It was now up to him to disable the remaining systems.
The Monster oriented himself in the darkness at the vault entrance. The only sound was the steady breathing of the others behind him. His body was already projecting heat into the vault—the hair spray on the infrared sensor wouldn't last. Every second he was there would raise the ambient temperature. He had to move quickly but keep his heart rate low.

The Monster bypassed the vault security system's main inbound and outbound wires and then covered this light sensor with tape, rendering it useless.

As he'd practiced in the warehouse, he strode exactly 11 steps into the middle of the room, reached for the ceiling, and pushed back a panel. He felt the security system's main inbound and outbound wires. An automatic electric pulse constantly shot into the room and back out along these wires. If any of the sensors were tripped, the circuit would break. When a pulse shot into the room, it expected an answer. If it didn't get one, it activated the alarm.
With his hands over his head, the Monster used a tool to strip the plastic coating off the wires. It was a delicate task. One slip could cut through, instantly breaking the circuit and tripping the alarm.
The police would later discover stripped wires in the ceiling and guess that the thieves considered cutting them, only to lose their nerve. But Notabartolo says that the Monster knew exactly what he was doing. Once the copper wires were exposed, he clipped a new, precut piece of wire between the inbound and outbound cables. This bridge rerouted the incoming electric pulse over to the outbound wire before the signal reached the sensors. It no longer mattered what happened further down the line. The sensors were out of the loop. It was now safe for the others to enter.
Still, the men were cautious. They blinded the heat/motion detector with a Styrofoam box, covered the light detector with tape, and then set to work. The King of Keys unloaded a homemade, hand-cranked drill and fitted it with a thin shaft of metal. He jammed the shaft into one of the locks and cranked for about three minutes—until the lock broke, snapping open the box.
The guys took turns yanking the contents out. Since they had memorized the layout of the vault in the replica, they worked in the dark, turning on their flashlights only for split seconds—enough to position the drill over the next box.
But in those muffled flashes, they could glimpse their duffel bags overflowing with gold bars, millions in Israeli, Swiss, American, European, and British currencies, and leather satchels that contained the mother lode: rough and polished diamonds. They resisted the urge to examine their haul; they were running out of time.
By 5:30 am, they had opened 109 boxes. A tamped-down giddiness pervaded the dark vault, but they had to stop. The streets would fill with people soon, and they needed to transfer their bags into Notarbartolo's car. Speedy relayed the message to him. They were coming out.
It took almost an hour for the team to haul the bags up the stairs, pass by the infrared sensor, lower the loot down the ladder, and gather in the hallway of the decrepit office building. Notarbartolo idled at the curb while on the phone with Speedy. A bus came and went, and then the street was empty.
"Now," he hissed.
In the predawn half-light, the four men raced out of the building. They jammed the bags in the car, slammed the doors, and headed off on foot for Notarbartolo's apartment. He put the car in gear and slowly pulled away.
In half an hour, they were huddled around the bags in the apartment. The Monster unzipped one and pulled out a leather satchel. It was time to celebrate.
He opened the satchel and looked up, bewildered. It was empty.
He took out another. It was also empty. A wave of anxiety swept the room. They unzipped all the other duffel bags and rifled through the satchels. More often than not, there was nothing in them.
Something had gone wrong. The diamonds should have been there.
"We've been set up," Notarbartolo said.
Notarbartolo stepped into a scalding-hot shower while the others made salami sandwiches in the kitchen. He needed some clarity—the fatigue was weighing on him. In the weeks preceding the heist, he had seen many of the satchels in the offices of the diamantaires, and they were always filled with inventory. He expected the total take to exceed $100 million. Now they were looking at a fraction of that—probably about $20 million.
Notarbartolo reflected on his interactions with the diamond dealer, and a thought flashed through his mind: Maybe the dealer wasn't operating alone. If he tipped off a group of his fellow merchants, they could have pulled their inventory out of the vault before the heist. Each could then claim that their gems were stolen and collect the insurance while secretly keeping their stones. Most had safes in their offices—they could have simply kept the stock there. Notarbartolo realized that the heist he had spent so much time planning might have actually been part of an elaborate insurance scam.
He shut off the water. A half hour earlier he was a king. Now he felt like a pawn.
Speedy and Notarbartolo were on the E19 heading out of Antwerp. It was 6 o'clock on Sunday evening. Notarbartolo settled in for the 10-hour drive back to Turin. The garbage bag filled with incriminating evidence sat in the backseat. Notarbartolo planned to stop in France and burn it, leaving no trace of the crime.
But Speedy was having trouble. His face was ashen, and his eyes darted madly at the cars around them. Finally, after only 20 minutes on the road, he snapped.
"I can't do the drive," he said.
The guy was melting down. Notarbartolo told him to take it easy. He'd drop him at the train station in Brussels if that's what he wanted. It might actually be nicer to do the trip without his friend driving him crazy.
"We can't take the garbage into Brussels," Speedy stammered. The city was crawling with cops—maybe they would be looking for them. They couldn't run the risk. They had to drop the bag immediately.
"Pull off up here," he said abruptly from the passenger seat.
"This is a ridiculous time to be having a panic attack," Notarbartolo muttered.
"Just pull off," his friend snapped.
Notarbartolo took the exit and surveyed the darkened surroundings.
"There's a dirt road," Speedy said, peering into a forest. "It'll be perfect."

The strip of forest alongside the E19 motorway where Speedy dumped the garbage bag of evidence.

August Van Camp likes weasels. The 59-year-old retired Belgian grocer had two—he called them Mickey and Minnie—and he enjoyed sending them down holes in the forest. Typically, a rabbit came rocketing out the other end. It was a lot of fun.
In 1998, he bought a narrow strip of forest alongside the E19 motorway. It was about a five-minute drive from his house, and if you ignored the sound of cars hurtling past at 80 miles an hour, it was a pretty 12 acres of trees with a gurgling stream. There were also a lot of holes with rabbits in them.
But because it adjoined the highway, Van Camp found a lot of garbage. The local teenagers once decided to have a party there and burned down a little hut he'd built. It made him fume with anger.
When he found garbage, he phoned the police, who had gotten used to his calls. A typical conversation:
"The kids have made a mess on my land again."
"I am sorry to hear that, Mr. Van Camp."
"I demand that you send someone to investigate."
"We will pass along your request."
Van Camp rarely heard back.

The garbage Van Camp found on his property that led to Notarbartolo's arrest.

While hunting one morning—Monday, February 17, to be exact—Van Camp was incensed to find yet another pile of junk in the underbrush. After a flash of pique that made him puff out his cheeks, throw up his arms, and wonder what the world was coming to, he knelt down and glared at the refuse. He wanted to be able to describe to the cops what he had to put up with. There was videotape strewn all over the place. A wine bottle rested near a half-eaten salami sandwich. There were also some white envelopes printed with the words diamond center, antwerp. Van Camp's irritation increased.
"Kids," he grumbled.
At home, he punched in the number for the police and asked to lodge a complaint. The officer listened as Van Camp tallied the mess. When Van Camp mentioned Diamond Center envelopes, the officer broke in. "What was that?" he said.
"Antwerp Diamond Center envelopes," Van Camp sputtered.
This time, the police came running.
By mid-afternoon, a half-dozen detectives swarmed the forest, painstakingly gathering the garbage and collecting stray gems. Van Camp watched with satisfaction. The police were finally treating his litter situation with the proper respect.
Within hours, the trash began to fill the evidence room at the Diamond Squad headquarters in Antwerp. A member of the squad bent over the clear plastic bags, looking for immediate clues. A pile of torn paper seemed promising. It didn't take long to reassemble the pieces like a jigsaw puzzle. It was an invoice for a low-light video surveillance system. The buyer: Leonardo Notarbartolo.

Notarbartolo's invoice for a low-light video surveillance system.

Back at Van Camp's property, another detective knelt among the thorny brambles and peered at a small, jagged piece of paper poking out of the mud. He carefully lifted it free and held it up to the light.
It was a business card that bore the address and phone number of Elio D'Onorio, an Italian electronics expert tied to a series of robberies. Notarbartolo has consistently refused to identify his accomplices, but all evidence indicates that D'Onorio is the Genius.
The lab techs also bagged a half-eaten salami sandwich. They found Antipasto Italiano salami packaging nearby and sent it along to Diamond Squad headquarters.
Four days later, the detectives executed a search warrant on the apartment Notarbartolo rented in Antwerp. In a cupboard, they found a receipt from a local grocery store for Antipasto Italiano salami. The receipt had a time-stamp.
A detective drove to the grocery and asked the manager to rewind his closed-circuit television to 12:56 pm on Thursday, February 13. When the video came to a halt and snapped into focus, there was an image of a tall, muscular Italian purchasing salami. His name: Ferdinando Finotto—the man most likely to be the Monster.
On Monday — about 36 hours after the job was completed—the team of thieves reassembled at a bar in Adro, Italy, a small town about 50 miles northeast of Milan. They had agreed to meet the diamond dealer there and divide the loot. The dealer would get a third for financing the operation and putting the team together. The others would split the rest. They had anticipated a haul in the tens of millions each. Now they were looking at roughly $3 million per man. It was still a lot of money, but they couldn't help feeling they'd been played. Everybody had a lot of questions for the dealer.
Hour after hour, he didn't arrive. Notarbartolo was already uneasy about what had happened in the forest. He knew he had made a mistake—he should have turned around after he dropped off Speedy at the train station and gone back to burn the garbage. It was an embarrassing oversight, but what really irked him was that he had vouched for his friend, and the guy had cracked.
They waited at the bar until closing, drinking espressos and then beer. The dealer never showed.
On Thursday night, Notarbartolo ate dinner with his family at home outside of Turin. He tried to pretend that everything was normal. As usual, his 3-year-old granddaughter played with his cell phone and made him laugh. He momentarily forgot his worries.
His biggest problem was that he needed to go back to Belgium; the rental car was due in Antwerp the next day. The plan had always been to return it and show his face at the Diamond Center. That way, if the cops were looking for tenants who'd disappeared, he wouldn't be on the list. It would also give him an opportunity to clean his apartment more thoroughly. He told his family that he'd be leaving early the next morning. His wife decided to come along; she hadn't seen much of him lately. They could even have a nice dinner party with some friends from the Netherlands.
The next morning, as the Notarbartolos blew through the Swiss Alps, the police surrounded their home in Italy. Acting on the surveillance-system invoice discovered on Van Camp's land, the Belgian diamond detectives had asked the Italian police to search Notarbartolo's house. His 24-year-old son, Marco, was there and refused to open the front door. He frantically dialed his father's cell phone while the police smashed the door open.
In Notarbartolo's jacket pocket, his phone flashed but made no sound. His granddaughter had accidently turned off the ringer the night before. Marco called his mother's phone—it was turned off. He tried his dad's phone repeatedly. It just rang and rang.
Unaware, Notarbartolo sped toward Antwerp.

Leonardo Notarbartolo was part of a five-man team behind the heist of the century.
Photo Courtesy Leonardo Notarbartolo

As Notarbartolo drove back to Belgium, Peys and De Bruycker wondered whether they'd ever catch the thieves. They could be anywhere by now: Brazil, Thailand, Russia. It never occurred to the detectives that one of the robbers would walk right back into the district.
But that's exactly what Notarbartolo did. While one of his friends from the Netherlands waited on the street outside the Diamond Center, Notarbartolo waved at the security guard and dropped in to collect his mail. The guard knew that the police were investigating Notarbartolo and phoned the building manager, who immediately called the detectives.
When the police arrived, they found Notarbartolo chatting with the building manager and began peppering him with questions. The friend took off as Notarbartolo stalled for time, pretending to have trouble understanding French and claiming that he couldn't remember the exact address of his own apartment. He just knew how to walk there.
"Let's go then," Peys said and loaded the Italian into a car.
Eventually, Notarbartolo pointed out the apartment.
As the police car pulled to the curb, Notarbartolo's wife and the friends who'd come for dinner stepped out of the building. They were loaded down with bags and one carried a rolled-up carpet. Another minute and they would have been gone.
The police took everyone into custody.
The bags contained critical evidence. The police dug out a series of prepaid SIM cards that were linked to cell phones used almost exclusively to call three Italians: Elio D'Onorio, aka the Genius; Ferdinando Finotto, alias the Monster; and the person most likely to be Speedy, an anxious, paranoid man named Pietro Tavano, a longtime associate of Notarbartolo's. On the night of the heist, a cell tower in the Diamond District logged the presence of all three, plus Notarbartolo. During that time, Tavano stayed in constant contact with Notarbartolo.
The day Notarbartolo was arrested, Italian police broke open the safe at his home in Turin. They found 17 polished diamonds attached to certificates that the Belgian diamond detectives traced back to the vault. More gems were vacuumed out of the rolled-up carpet from Notarbartolo's Antwerp apartment.
The Belgian courts came down hard. They found Notarbartolo guilty of orchestrating the heist and sentenced him to 10 years.
With the cell phone records and the peculiarly precise salami sandwich evidence, the Belgian detectives persuaded French police to raid the home of Finotto's girlfriend on the French Riviera. They retrieved marked $100 bills that the detectives say belonged to one of the Diamond Center victims. Legal proceedings dragged on, but Finotto was finally arrested in Italy in November 2007 and is serving a five-year sentence there.
When questioned by police in Italy, D'Onorio admitted that he had installed security cameras in Notarbartolo's office but denied any involvement in the crime. Nonetheless, his DNA was found on some adhesive tape left in the vault. He was extradited to Belgium in November 2007 to begin a five-year sentence.
The high-strung Pietro Tavano is serving a five-year sentence in Italy for the crime. He has refused to allow his attorney to make any statements on his behalf.
A fifth thief has never been identified, though police know of his existence via cell phone records and DNA traces. The King of Keys was never apprehended.
On January 4, 2009, I see Notarbartolo for the last time. Over the past 14 weeks, we have met seven times in the prison visiting room, and yet questions remain. Was $100 million stolen as the police estimate, or just $20 million as Notarbartolo insists? Does it make sense that the heist was part of a larger insurance scam or is Notarbartolo's story a decoy to throw suspicion on others? Perhaps Notarbartolo's cousin, the Mafia don, was behind the whole thing. Whatever the truth, where is the loot now?
The murky nature of the diamond trade makes it difficult to get clear answers. For instance, detective De Bruycker says that three-quarters of the business is done under the table. Since there were roughly $25 million in legitimate claims at the time of the heist, he calculated that at least another $75 million in goods was stolen. That brought the total value of the heist to about $100 million.
If Notarbartolo's insurance scam theory is correct, it went down like this: The dealers who were in on it removed their goods—both legal and illegal—from the vault before the heist and then filed claims on the legitimate gems. Denice Oliver, the adjuster who investigated the robbery for insurers, calls this the "double whammy"—these dealers would have gotten the insurance payouts and kept their stock. The $20 million found by the thieves belonged to traders not in on the scam.
Or: There was no insurance scam. The thieves actually found $100 million in the vault and Notarbartolo has spun a story to cloud the true origins of the heist.
Regardless of which theory is correct, there is agreement that the thieves got away with millions that were never recovered. Notarbartolo refuses to talk about what happened to the goods, adding that it is something best discussed once he is out of prison.
In the meantime, his share may very well be waiting for him, hidden somewhere in the foothills of the Italian Alps.
Joshua Davis (www.joshuadavis.net) wrote about the Kaminsky Internet bug in issue 16.12.