Flawless by Scott Andrew Selby

Author:Scott Andrew Selby
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Union Square Press
Published: 2010-02-01T16:00:00+00:00

The discovery of the trash put the detectives on the scent immediately and led them in many different directions. The Delhaize bag with the household garbage contained beer bottles, a wine bottle, empty plastic yogurt pots, and half of a partially eaten salami sandwich, all of which the police analyzed for DNA. They found two toll receipts in the garbage as well: one was for passage over the Brenner Pass from Italy on Sunday, February 9, 2003, and one for a toll highway through Innsbruck, Austria, on the same day. It was the first clue that their suspects were Italians.

The bag also contained receipts for items bought at a Brico hardware store in Mechelen on Valentine’s Day and at a local Delhaize supermarket the day before that. The items on the receipts matched what was found in the garbage as well as in the vault, including the crowbar, the Styrofoam, and the duster handle. Detectives were eventually dispatched to both stores, to see if anyone remembered who had made these purchases and, if they were lucky, to get CCTV video. They purchased all the items from both receipts so they could compare them with items found during their investigation.

Detectives also recovered thirty-five torn squares of paper stained by used coffee grounds from the Delhaize bag. “My colleagues started to puzzle that document together, not knowing whether it would be an invoice or somebody’s account,” said Peys. “You never know what you’re going to find.”

Many of these clues paid off quickly.

At the Brico store, for instance, detectives showed the receipt to the staff and a cashier remembered the purchase. It stuck in her mind, she said, because the men had paid with a 500-euro note, which was a rarity. Only one other customer that day had paid with a bill that large. The store hadn’t deposited the bills yet, and the police collected them to test for fingerprints. They found none.

The store didn’t have security cameras, but the employee described the men in detail. The detectives would later match those descriptions to D’Onorio and Finotto.

If there was any group of people who were as good as thieves at remembering the details of past heists, it was the police detectives who investigated them. As soon as the heist was discovered, they ran a catalog of comparable crimes from the past through their minds. One stood out as similar: the botched job at the KBC bank on Pelikaanstraat in 1997. During that attempt, men posing as bank clients had tried to access the vault area after hours but had set off an alarm in the process of trying to disable it. The thieves got away, and the police were able to identify one of them, but only long after he had fled the country. Detectives remembered that he had rented an office in the Diamond Center from which to organize the bank heist.

The man who’d been convicted in absentia in Belgium and arrested in Italy—but who’d never served time for the crime in Belgium—was Ferdinando Finotto of Turin.

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