Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Alison Lanier | Film | August 14, 2025
Stolen: Heist of the Century tells a simple story in a familiar format: the intrepid investigators set out to solve a crime. In this case, though, the crime is the largest diamond heist in history, and the investigators are members of the Federal Police’s Diamond Squad, closing in on the robbers’ trail by the hour.
It’s Antwerp, 2003. At the heart of the diamond district, a vault door stands open. Hundreds of millions in gems are gone. It’s a mystery as to how it was done—until one of the robbers (and, just maybe, the mastermind of the whole heist) sits down to narrate the process for this Netflix documentary.
In painstaking (and rather self-satisfied) detail, Leonardo Notarbartolo takes the viewer on a step-by-step of the years-long operation of breaking into this unbreakable vault one small innovation at a time. Some of it sounds very unlikely; some of it sounds downright impossible. But at a certain point, I kind of stopped caring. It’s too fascinating and precise to be disappointing, even if the truth is a bit smudged at the edges.
Between the chipper robber and the indefatigable diamond agents on his trail, among all the gizmos and gadgets and strange inventive solutions, the viewer is reminded why the heist narrative is so quintessentially fascinating. It’s an elaborate, dramatic production, an orchestration, where something will inevitably go wrong and everything is always on the line. This heist story fits snugly into its filmic genre—except that it’s all true. Or, true-ish.
With each fresh twist and turn, the behind-the-camera interviewer has the surreal task of informing the investigators of the solution to the unsolvable crime, now over two decades behind them.
The doc also takes us on a tour of the stranger-than-fiction “School of Turin”: Turin, Italy, at the time, stood as a massive manufacturing hub, and that meant it also produced many skilled metalworkers and manual laborers who would sometimes take their skills and make the jump to the other side of the law. As the story of the heist comes together, threads tying back to this so-called “School of Turin” crop up over and over again.
A shopkeeper finds a burst rubbish bag spewing diamonds and emeralds in the woods. A diamond-themed tennis tournament is underway. A multi-departmental force painstakingly reassembles a torn-apart VHS tape (with the help of Sony) only to find it’s….just porn. A half-eaten sandwich could blow the whole case wide open and take down a mastermind.
Honestly, the screenplay writes itself. Somebody get on this.
(Yes, I know it’s been tried, but the rights expired at Paramount…)
Stolen: Heist of the Century is now streaming on Netflix.
