Of course, actually getting away with your loot is the most important part of any robbery, and that's where the duo's mob connections came in. When police tried to reach the scene, they found that several hired vehicles had been inconveniently parked in a way that completely blocked access to the store. The mob had essentially built a wall of cars to cordon off part of the city, giving the diamond bandits a pretty strong opportunity to get away clean. The thieves immediately seized the chance to crash their getaway car into a London taxi cab. (Note: Even sophisticated real-life criminals are kind of stupid.)

The criminals escaped to another car, but one of them left his cell phone on the seat of the abandoned vehicle. The police traced it back to Calderwood and Kassaye, who were arrested, but the diamonds were never recovered. It's believed that they passed the loot off to another guy on a motorcycle at some point during the getaway, who delivered the diamonds to the mob and/or their waiting buyer.

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Who took off by hang glider, to meet his buyer in a hot air balloon, who flew it to a submarine ...

In the end, only four people out of the presumably dozens involved were convicted, and nobody got shot or had an argument about tipping.

At the time, the Antwerp Diamond Centre was one of the most secure locations on earth, a facility in which a large percentage of the world's diamond supply was protected by several layers of vaults, magnetic fields, seismic sensors, motion sensors, heat detectors, and Doppler radar. Presumably noticing that a direct Mission: Impossible-style break-in would be about as successful as trying to boost the Technodrome, Notarbartolo started putting a more complex plan in motion -- starting a full three years before the actual heist. So, in 2000, he successfully rented an office in the building and stored some of his own property in the vault.

Now, since this isn't a movie and we can't show you a planning/training montage, we have to fast forward to a weekend in 2003, when nearly $100 million worth of uncut diamonds disappeared overnight from the most secure vault in the world. It was the biggest jewel heist in the history of mankind (at the time), and, to this day, police still aren't entirely sure how the hell he did it.

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"Hey, I got it. What if there never were no diamonds? I never saw no diamonds."

According to Notarbartolo, he and four other teammates with fantastic code names (including The Genius and The Monster) broke into the vault in the middle of the night, using an elaborate series of truly ingenious hacks, such as coating the vault's body heat alarm with hair spray, covering the security cameras with black bags so it would still appear that the building was dark, and redirecting the vault's magnetic field alarm with a piece of aluminum.

Once inside the vault, the thieves emptied as many boxes of gold and diamonds as they could, working in the dark from memory after having practiced countless times on an exact replica of the vault -- which you might recognize as being literally the exact thing they did in Ocean's Eleven. Considering the police's official explanation for the heist is "magic," we have no choice but to accept Notarbartolo's version of events.

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"Arrest Clooney and Eisenberg just to be safe."

Notarbartolo and three of the four men were arrested after a stack of circumstantial evidence was discovered in a garbage bag on the side of a country road (including several envelopes and videotapes from the Antwerp Diamond Centre, and a receipt showing Notarbartolo as having purchased a low-light surveillance system). However, Notarbartolo only served part of his 10-year sentence before being paroled (his alleged accomplices were given even shorter sentences), and the diamonds were never recovered. This has a lot to do with the fact that stolen diamonds are notoriously difficult to trace. So, even if the police found Notarbartolo rolling around in a bathtub full of them, there's almost no way to definitively prove that those diamonds aren't his.

But, by far, his most renowned evil deed was the theft of the most valuable piece of jewelry in the world at the time: a pearl necklace worth more than the modern world's most valuable diamond. If that sounds strange, keep in mind that pearl cultivation hadn't yet been invented at the time, so pearls still had to be harvested from wild clams, and finding one was incredibly rare. So, an entire necklace of pearls was like finding every one of Willy Wonka's Golden Tickets and then making a necklace out of them.

How did Grizzard manage to steal such a priceless item? Well, as strange as it sounds, back in those days, it was common to ship cosmically valuable pieces of finery in the regular mail. The reasoning was that a billion-dollar necklace would be way more difficult to intercept if it was just one anonymous package among a million other identical (but worthless) packages, rather than in a bedazzled lockbox being carried by armored transport. The owners of the necklace thought they were being clever when they sent it from Paris to London via standard mail, but Grizzard was hell-bent on finding something else he could hide in a bowl of soup.

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"Pearls! They're the croutons on the sea!"

After bribing a bunch of postal inspectors, Grizzard managed to locate the prized envelope and "relocated" the pearls, replacing them with clippings from a French newspaper and a few lumps of sugar. Grizzard correctly assumed that the inclusion of French clippings would lead police to believe that a Frenchman had stolen the necklace, since police at that time assumed the real world worked like an episode of Blue's Clues.

The ruse worked for a while, but, eventually, the authorities suspected that Grizzard was behind it on the basis that only he would be that fucking annoying. They set up a surveillance operation to nab him when he tried to sell the necklace. However, Grizzard had anticipated this and used his organized crime connections to set up his own surveillance operation on the police.

Glasgow Digital Library
"I- I really fucking hate that guy."
"Let it go, Stevens."

After some time, this ridiculous cat-and-mouse game ended with Grizzard's goons having to abandon the necklace in a gutter, where it was found by a random passerby, who handed it in to the police. Although, we can't help but wonder if that, too, had somehow been part of the plan.

He sold Goering a newly-discovered painting by the 17th-century artist Johannes Vermeer, although, if you've been paying attention, you've probably guessed that what van Meegeren actually sold Goering was a picture he had painted himself, in Vermeer's style. Van Meegeren's original intention was to come clean after tricking the #2 German into buying one of his knockoffs, thus proving that the Nazis were a bunch of gullible idiots. But, instead, he went mad with power and built himself a career producing Vermeer forgeries and selling them, while becoming an alcoholic and a morphine addict in the process. His sudden change of heart might have also had something to do with the realization that "taking a joke" was not something the Nazis were known for.

Eventually, the Allies won the war, and the Nazis' stolen artwork was recovered, but this created a new, incredibly ironic problem for van Meegeren: His forgeries were so realistic that the Allies assumed that he had stolen them for the Nazis, and they arrested him for art theft. Despite admitting that he had forged the pieces, his forgeries were so good that art appraisers hired by the Allied prosecutors didn't believe him, assuming he was lying in order to reduce his sentence. Only after being plied with enough alcohol and morphine to successfully replicate a Vermeer painting was van Meegeren able to prove his innocence. Or, at least, prove that he was a different kind of guilty.

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"It is true -- I cheated Hitler. I accept one year in prison and/or the key to the city."