Wired is running an outstanding story about the 2003 Antwerp diamond heist. The story provides a lot of information about how the heist itself was carried out, from the high tech reconnaissance that was conducted with a stealthy camera, to the blindingly low-tech of using a plexiglass shield to hide a heat signature. My favorite was spraying the heat and motion detector in the vault with hairspray to temporarily blind it.

Like most criminals, they got sloppy. They dumped incriminating garbage in property abutting a highway. Unluckily for them, the property owner was one who would routinely call police whenever he found stray signs of people on his property. It’s no surprise that four days after one of the largest diamond robberies in history, police were very interested in trash that included envelopes from the Antwerp diamond center. There were also receipts for equipment used during the robbery, including the name of one of the robbers.

The thing I find most surprising is that someone implicated in a 20 to 100 million dollar (depending upon whose figures you use) theft only spent six years in prison. Each individual share is believed to have been at least three million dollars. That’s about $1370 per day in jail. How many people would spend six years in prison in exchange for three million dollars?