Spurs chairman Daniel Levy is expected to boost his club’s financial muscle by bringing the well-regarded company to White Hart Lane this summer, along with its mountains of rare and precious diamonds.
Levy been monitoring De Beers for some time and is likely to make a move in June or July, when the diamond market is relatively quiet, and when security is likely to be relaxed.
“It won’t be easy to get De Beers,” a Tottenham insider told FourFourTwo. “The vaults are solid iron, protected by a team of heavily armed security guards. There’s CCTV in each room, and every inch of the floor is covered by an infra-red laser alarm. The eight-digit access codes are changed hourly, and no one man knows more than three of the numbers. In short, it’s a fortress.
“Plus, there is an identical De Beers nearby. We’re not interested in that De Beers, but there’s always a risk that you end up targeting the wrong one.
“But Levy is a mastermind. If anyone can disable the alarms, create a diversion, overcome the guards, grab the diamonds and blast their way back out again, it’s the man they call the Levyl Genius.”
Spurs pair Jake Livermore and Tom Carroll have been working at De Beers for five months under false names, while Levy himself, having donned a false moustache and adopted the character of Professor Ivan Deelly, has been establishing friendships with senior boardroom figures, the better to learn their secrets.
Should his daring plan fail, Levy is expected to pin responsibility on his patsy Tim Sherwood, who has publicly expressed his unhappiness at Spurs swooping for De Beers instead of a good old-fashioned English jewel heist.
The odds of Spurs successfully pulling off the mission have been described as “incredibly slim, but still a thousand per cent likelier than Carlo Ancelotti deciding to leave Real Madrid for Haringey.”
