When Rubinstein's article on the recovery of the stolen watches appeared in Ha'aretz on November 11, 2007, the international press picked it up immediately. Hundreds of follow-up stories appeared, and watch bloggers and on-line watch forums were aflame with speculation. The tale was richly compelling: a heist, a watch worth an estimated $11 million, a mysterious widow, a taciturn lawyer. The same things that made the tale so hard for the police to follow gave it a frisson in the global media. It was an evocative detective story, suffused with intrigue. Where had the watches been all those years? Rubinstein closed his article on a note of conjecture, writing that "the identity of the thieves remains a mystery. However they are believed unlikely to have been inveterate watch collectors, but rather local operators, at least two in number."122
As calls from other reporters seeking comment came in to the Jerusalem Police, the embarrassed authorities realized they needed to dig further. The Central Investigation Unit, which normally investigated murders and major thefts, had conducted the original investigation in 1983. Now, the unit assigned the same two young detectives, Oded Shamah and Oded Janiv, to the case. Together with a team that included a muscular Russian investigator named Eddie Zharkov and two female detectives, the well-travelled Revital Zaraf and computer whiz Na'ama Mai, they began piecing together the puzzle. Their first stop was the L.A. Mayer Museum.
The group began by visiting Rachel Hasson and Eli Khan in the library. They went over the negotiations and the return of the watches. The museum staff knew almost nothing, and Hasson said very little, citing her promise to keep mum about the lawyer and her mysterious client. Janiv found Hasson's reticence frustrating. "She had none of the details of the widow," Janiv said later. "She also refused to talk to the press and would not talk to the police because that was also in the agreement."
But Yakubov, the watchmaker, produced a document found on one of the boxes, and it led the detectives to the warehouse where Efron-Gabai had stored the items. At the warehouse, in central Israel, the police found bills of lading from a woman in Los Angeles, Nili Shamrat.
Entering Shamrat's name into a police computer, Detective Mai came up with nothing. Then she performed a similar Google search. In seconds, a story by reporter Dalia Karpel appeared: "Eagle's Wings Cut," published on May 26, 2004. There in black and white, a snapshot showed a skinny man with a dark buzz cut lying in a hospital bed after being shot by the Israeli police in the 1970s. His name, according to the article, was Na'aman Diller. Arrayed around the image were four other pictures taken after this man committed a series of ingenious robberies between 1967 and the early 1980s, when he disappeared. Next to the photos was a paragraph of text:
Diller's 59-year-old wife, Nili Shamrat - who also flew in from the United States - tearfully eulogized him. Supported by a childhood friend, she spoke softly, "My darling, so gentle, noble and talented. You have returned to your roots."123
"Bingo," Mai shouted, running down the hall to her partners to show them the printout.
According to town lore, one summer morning in 1957 a North American T-6 Harvard, one of the smaller training planes in the Israeli Air Force, buzzed low and fast over the eucalyptus trees and under the low power lines of Kibbutz Ein HaHoresh, a small community about sixty kilometers north of Jerusalem. The plane, painted bright yellow and, by its markings, based at the IAF training school at Petach Tikva, "went on to skim the fish ponds at Kibbutz Maabarot, coming in so low that it knocked a farmer off his tractor." The pilot then pulled up, waggled his wings, and disappeared into the horizon and into infamy.
The pilot's name was Na'aman Diller, and his family had been early members of Ein HaHoresh, literally the "Plowman's Spring," a small settlement founded in 1931 and home to some five hundred idealistic and taciturn settlers. The town motto was a verse about flight and acceptance:
Our best years behind us
We did not chase winds in a dream
No dream more beautiful than our actions
Although Ein HaHoresh had many brave sons and daughters in the Israeli military, it was Na'man Diller who took the motto to heart and took to the air at an early age. Now, he was about to be grounded.
As the plane flew overhead, one resident, Giora Furman, then twenty-two and a flight school instructor on vacation, approached Aaron Shavit, the commander of the nearby IAF flight school and inquired as to the name of the "falcon" who buzzed his village. "He promised to find out," Furman would recall years later. "The next day he kicked Diller out of the course."
Recklessness and repentance were the two constants in Diller's life. His widow, Shamrat, would later describe him as kind and friendly, outgoing but quiet in large groups, the heart of any gathering. Look at pictures of him and you're drawn to his deeply lined face, the pat of curly hair that he sometimes shaved to a military buzz, and his large blue eyes. He was whippet-thin, even as a child, and had the studied, careful demeanor of an athlete at rest. He exhibited flashes of sobering intelligence, and at the same time his manner marked him as a man of the earth, a kibbutznick, someone who would make his parents proud.
"In some ways," said Shamrat. "It separated him from so many other people, but [he] was very quick to understand things. In Hebrew, there is an expression that says somebody has golden hands, meaning that he can do everything. He was very, very technically and mechanically oriented."
In 1957, Na'aman was to be one of Ein HaHoresh's wind chasers, protecting the hard-won homeland from the massing forces at her borders. Israel then was a wild and rugged place. That January, four Israeli POWs were traded for an astonishing 5,850 Egyptian prisoners, including a number of military generals. In March, another four soldiers were kidnapped in Petra, and the small planes of the IAF ran reconnaissance along the borders, hoping to avoid further losses. The Israeli government tasked the nascent IAF, flying used WWII planes and jets sourced from friendly Western nations, with protecting troops on the ground, and the soldiers were always in trouble. To be a Kibbutzim was an honor in itself, and to be a Kibbutzim military man was the highest honor a young man could bestow on his proud parents.
Na'aman had been born on January 7, 1939, to an idealistic young Polish woman, Ernestine Friedman, nicknamed Arne. She was a psychologist from Jaroslaw, Poland, a small town west of Wroclaw, home to one of the few Jewish synagogues remaining on the San River. When she landed in Israel, near Eliat, in 1935, she barely spoke Hebrew. She was assigned to teach kindergarten, but when the children asked her the name of a flower or bug she couldn't answer. Instead, she would promise to look it up and return with the answer in the morning. "There was a stage when I stopped going for walks in the garden with the children so they wouldn't ask so many questions," she said.124
She was overbearing, opinionated, and dedicated to the Zionist cause. Her husband, Na'aman's father, was Zvi Diller, a taciturn man who fell in love with Arne "because she worked hard." Like Na'aman, he was tall and skinny with dark hair. He was the quiet to Arne's storm, accepting and stoic in the face of his wife's outbursts.
The boy, born at the brand new Beilinson Hospital in Petach Tikva, was healthy and seemingly happy. But in his first few years he would lose much of the hale good health and hearty strength associated with his father and mother. Arne worked in the kibbutz kindergarten until a wave of typhus spread through Israel and Palestine, leaving her weak and bedridden. Out of work for months as she recovered, she reported back to the kindergarten only to be told she now had to toil in the fields with her husband. Refusing to work under the sun, she left Zvi and their young son and moved to Tel Aviv. Na'aman was one year old.
Two years later she returned, chastened by her inability to find a permanent job in Tel Aviv. Ein HaHoresh now needed teachers, and they gave her a position at the school again. But after being away so long, she now felt herself an outsider and not "accepted" by the Kibbutz.
Trouble started almost immediately. The kindergarten had two rooms separated by a thin wall. Arne taught one group, while her son sat in another. When she spoke louder than a near-whisper, Na'aman would cry for her. Having her own class to teach, she could do nothing. The boy's constant mewling caused a rift with the other teachers, who felt that he was weak and spoiled.
The other children noticed it as well and began to pick on him. Absalom Artzi, a classmate, uncharitably recalled him as being a scrawny coward. "He was a weakling and kids are mean to weaklings. He was alone and had no one to protect him," he said. As an older child, Na'aman came to love reading; he would recall that his "kingdom was in books."
Even his mother had trouble loving him. In a 1971 psychologist's interview, she said Na'aman was "unwanted." By then, his escapades could have hardened her opinion of her son, but from the beginning something had pushed him from her. Perhaps, she said, he reminded her of the isolation of the kibbutz, or perhaps it was because he was a "good boy but not a good kid," as she characterized him in an interview. As a result, the psychologists believed, he always had something to prove.
Na'aman went to jail for a year thanks to his 1957 airplane joyride. His mother, visiting him in the military brig, found him disconsolate: he missed flying. "It was the most wonderful thing I ever felt," he said. "Up and down. I was quick as a bird and as canny as a reptile." He was discharged from active duty but remained in the Army reserves.
Na'aman returned to the kibbutz and lived quietly with his parents. But his fall from the IAF had changed him. He seemed haunted, now, and he kept his eyes open for an opportunity to leave. He knew he needed money.
One Saturday in July, 1959, a neighbor caught Na'aman riffling through a strongbox that held donations designated for Ein HaHoresh's soldiers. The rest of the kibbutz was at a funeral for another soldier killed in a plane crash, and Na'aman had exploited their grief to enrich himself. After a unanimous vote, the kibbutz leaders expelled him from the settlement. The kibbutz lifestyle was all about trust, and for a son of the group to betray it to such a degree was almost unthinkable. One member remembered that the kibbutzim "almost lynched him on the spot."
In Israel, kibbutzim were close to national heroes. They consisted of small, dedicated groups, usually no more than two hundred members, living in relative isolation on Israel's windswept plains and burning deserts. They were self-sufficient. Although now known for farming, they were the source of most of Israel's early industrial efforts. Kibbutzim were Israel's builders.
Na'aman's misbehavior wasn't entirely unexpected. According to one contemporary, Yitzchak Baram, "Na'aman stole all the time. We called it petty theft. When he was in the army he had a girlfriend in Beit Lid and he would steal cars from the kibbutz to go visit her." But innocent joyriding was a long way from wholesale larceny.
Thrust out into the world for the first time, Diller's plan was simple: to find wealth, no matter the price. Assessing him psychologically in 1967, Dr. Dov Alexandrovich would find that he had a "mental disorder that affects the thought process. Here is a person who shows early signs of schizophrenia." Diller's lawyer requested this psychological investigation, during his second arraignment for breaking and entering, in order to enter a plea of innocence due to insanity. But no one in Diller's life remembers him taking any psychotropic drugs or exhibiting signs of mental illness-suggesting it might have been a dodge to avoid prosecution.
This much was sure: Na'aman "felt inferior," and he thought that money possessed an "omnipotent power" that could repair his life.
In 1957, exiled from the kibbutz in disgrace, he vowed to change his life and moved in with an aunt in Tel Aviv. He was an intelligent young man with an IQ of about 130, which put him in the top 3 percent nationally.
By 1960 he was working at Bank Leumi, Israel's storied banking group, and going to school for accounting. Outwardly, he became a normal, well-adjusted young man headed for great things. He was, he said, looking for "a way to get ahead in life." He spent time working at an insurance company and a Ministry of Education archive, trying to "prove his worth" by making more money. But the money never arrived, and by 1967 he was making other plans for his future. He had quit his job and was secretly being sent money by his mother. He still lived with his Aunt Hila and her husband Aryeh Reznik, a minor Israeli sculptor, in an apartment on Emanuel Avenue. He kept to himself.
Tel Aviv in the 1960s was awash with change. New immigrants were arriving by the boat- and planeload and with them new methods for bilking the next wave. Gangsters from Russia were rolling through town, ensuring that smuggling and antiquities theft was rampant. It was the era of the suave cat burglar. Sean Connery's James Bond was the most popular film character of the era, and his exploits in You Only Live Twice were breaking box-office records at the Hod Theatre in Tel Aviv. Albeit with a slightly criminal twist, it was on this image that many of Israel's aspiring criminals modeled their wardrobes and methods. Na'aman was among them.
Putting his military training to use, Na'aman had collected a number of plans and diagrams of buildings around Tel Aviv in his "operations log." For years, he studied security systems and tested the fence and window bars at various landmarks. Even without professional experience, he began to understand the mindset of security professionals.
Diller became interested - some would say obsessed - with health. He began losing his hair, and he blamed his diet. Becoming a vegan, he grew even thinner and became obsessed with cleanliness, showering at least twice a day. It was also during this time that he fell in love with a young woman named Nili Shamrat, whom Diller's mother described as a "flower girl." "I met Na'aman at a party and it was love at first sight," Shamrat said years later. "The relationship was very, very vibrant and very strong. Na'aman actually was a very romantic person." Shamrat had long, wavy hair and was Diller's physical opposite. Whereas Na'aman, the former soldier, was all angles and corners, Nili was skinny yet vivacious, a picture of health and intellect. She knew nothing of Na'aman's past, and he kept it that way for years. She lived in Israel for a few years longer, but by 1980 had moved to the United States and out of Na'aman's life. During these years, he lived the life of an ascetic, eating little, and planning.
On October 8, 1967, a small story appeared on the ITIM news wire describing a foiled break-in in a northern suburb of Tel Aviv on Keren Kayemet Boulevard. The morning before, a neighbor had heard noises coming from number 47, a Halva'a Behisachon Bank branch with a vault in the basement. A window in back led to an empty field. Arriving there at around 8 a.m., Sergeant Eliezer Merhavi and Constable Ronnie Chandler found the grate over the window broken. They pulled it back, and Nadler, the smaller of the two, climbed through.
Inside, the bank was dark and quiet. Chandler moved quickly and silently to the vault, where he found a surprising sight: a man-sized hole cut straight through six inches of steel. Nadler moved through the hole, his gun drawn, and received a face full of tear gas.
Blind and staggering, Chandler fell forward onto the man inside the room. He began to grapple him with him and, although he could barely see anything, Chandler, a "champion featherweight boxer," began throwing tight punches at the burglar's face. The burglar pulled a pistol from his jacket and fired once. At the sound of the report, Merhavi ran down the hall to help his partner just as the burglar was coming out of the vault.
In the fight that followed, Merhavi pulled his gun and shot the burglar in the foot. The man lay wounded and blinded from residual tear gas, as the policemen called for back-up and rounded up the thief's gear-canvas sacks full of hammers, chisels, lock picks, and, more importantly, the loot he had just taken from the bank vault. In his wallet, they found a license for a late model Opel hatchback in the name of Na'aman Diller, age 28, late of Ein HaHoresh. In his car, parked a few blocks away, they found the contents of fifty safety deposit boxes, including $8,000 in cash and diamonds and jewelry worth a little over one hundred thousand dollars.
Diller was transported to Ichilov Hospital, the first (but not last) time that he was driven away from a burglary site in an ambulance. The papers lapped up the story, dubbing him the "Kibbutznik burglar."
Diller's preparations for the robbery had begun five months earlier, when he started digging a shallow ditch from a small shack along nearby Be'er Tuvya street, a tiny circular road accessible only though a copse of trees. He ran the ditch through an empty courtyard, digging slowly and carefully and even leaving hazard barriers up when he went home at night. He wore postal service overalls as he dug and told anyone who inquired that he was "testing some wires."
Into this ditch, over the next few weeks, he began laying a 164-foot length of iron pipe and two wires in sections. The pipe stopped at the barred rear window of the bank. Diller worked slowly, steadily, and with great precision. His goal was to become part of the scenery, a normal worker with a normal job to do. Then, at the end of May, the army called Diller up to fight in the Six Days War, and he had to set his project aside, half-finished. For the next two months, he bristled under military order and discipline, itching to return to his work.
By July, he was out of uniform and back in his ditch. He had hidden the pipe under a load of dirt and capped the ends before he left. The plants in the courtyard had, by now, grown over most of the work site. He resumed his slow, methodical labor, appearing to all the world to be a lone member of a road crew forced by his higher ups to perform the unglamorous job of ditch digging. Finally, by October, he had crossed the field, leaving a small length of pipe and cable sticking out of the ground.
He left for about a week, then returned on Wednesday, October 4, the eve of Rosh Hashanah. He was driving a stolen Ford Taunus Transit van, a globular-looking, German-made work van that was commonly seen cruising around Europe and Israel retrofitted as an ice cream truck in the late 1960s. He parked the van near the field and again went away. He returned on Friday the 6th at 11 o'clock in the morning.
Jerusalem was quiet. Diller would have most of Friday and all of Saturday to work unobstructed, and he knew no one would be at the bank until Monday. He had the neighborhood to himself.
Having cased the bank for months, Diller knew that the rear alarm was primitive and easy to shut off. He removed the grate from the back window, opened it, and climbed inside. He slowly brought in his tools, laying them out like a painter preparing his work area. Then he went back out the window, replaced the grate, and by noon was home, showered, and resting for his return in the evening.
At eleven that night, he returned in his small Opel. He pulled a small canister of oxygen from the van - he had six in total - and connected it to the pipe. He then connected a battery to the leads and walked back to the window. He was carrying a canister of acetylene and a home-made oxy-acetylene torch. The battery wires would power his lighter and lamps. The oxygen flowed from the van to the back room through the buried pipe, ensuring he would not have to lug a set of extremely conspicuous canisters across the garden.
The vault was protected by a six-inch thick steel door. He set about cutting through the metal a layer at a time, inching his way closer to the inside. Hours later, he had made a hole big enough to step through without trouble.
Finally, he was inside. He quickly cut through three bank safes and pulled open fifty safe deposit boxes. He left with a bag full of loot, and later on Saturday morning he returned for more. By this time he had been working for forty-eight hours straight and he was exhausted. Faced with another set of safes, Diller began pounding at the locks with reckless abandon, assuming that everyone would be asleep. A neighbor, awoken by the banging, called the police.
After months of careful planning and a six-month operation, Diller was foiled by his own impatience. When the tear gas cleared, police were convinced there had been multiple thieves, and that they had escaped. They served Diller with a search warrant at his bedside in Tel Aviv's Ichilov Hospital and broke down the door to his small apartment. There, they realized the truth: Diller had acted alone. A library of books on welding and safecracking littered his sparsely furnished home. They found two live hand grenades taken from the Army reserve armory and foreign currency. They also found his operations log detailing the entire plan.
As Diller lay handcuffed to a bed, he began to speak with a lawyer and a psychologist. The plan was to plead insanity, so Diller explained himself and his actions. The psychologist, Dr. Dov Alexanderovitz, interviewed him extensively and found that Diller was able to "maintain some kind of connection to reality. At the same time, because of his disorder, he is forced to give up on many areas of his life, including his sex life." Instead, Diller explained, he gained a sort of pleasure from theft.
"It's something like the thrill of a man at a beautiful woman when he knows she could be his," he said. "You're tense, concentrated on an object you want to carry. You do not even need the thing you stole, you need only the excitement."
When word of his arrest trickled back to Ein HaHoresh, the kibbutz was outraged. They struck Diller's name from the kibbutz registry, and argued over whether the kibbutz would help Arne Diller pay her son's legal fees. In November, Na'aman's mother took a one-year leave of absence in order to support her son as he stood trial in Tel Aviv. The psychiatric evaluation swayed the jury and slowly the punishment was whittled down to a few years in prison before being passed along to the judge.
Around this time, Diller's family changed their name to Lidor (a loose anagram) to disassociate themselves from the shanda of their black sheep. Na'aman also soon changed his last name to Lidor, and when the family later changed it back, he did too. Ultimately, this maneuver would allow him to keep and carry two passports, a useful tool for a cat burglar.
In March of 1968 he was sentenced to four years in prison for the bank theft and disappeared behind bars. By all indications, he was a model prisoner, taciturn and obedient, and in February of 1971, he was released early for good behavior. He returned to Tel Aviv to live with his mother, and that same month was diagnosed with skin cancer.
On July 17, 1971, another tiny item crossed the Itim wires. "Rubin paintings stolen from son," the piece read. A dozen paintings had been taken from the home of Davi Rubin, son of Reuven Rubin, the famous Israeli painter whose early landscape work has been compared to Cezanne's. His home at 14 Rehov Bialik had been ransacked over a weekend, and the neighbors had heard nothing. Rubin, who had been out of town, returned to find many of his father's famous oils, including Flute Player and Landscape with Olive trees, gone. Also stolen were two Picasso etchings and a dove-shaped diamond pin that Reuven had made for his wife on their fortieth anniversary. Reuven Rubin, his son recalled, "never recovered and returned to the way he was before the burglary." He grew sick with worry and died three years later.
This theft seemed almost magical. The locked doors had not been forced or picked, and the house, except for the damage caused by the theft, held no clues. One morning after the burglary, however, David Rubin noticed one of the bars on a high window was askew. He dragged a chair to the window and tapped it. It moved and he found that it had been cut and wrapped in colored tape and smoothed over with dark putty. The police knew this to be a classic Diller move - he had admitted trying this trick, and it seemed Diller's specialty was the difficult entrance and the easy-going exit.
The police followed Diller for a few weeks, until on August 16 they spotted him in a stolen van with the wrong license plates. They stopped him, searched his home and van, and came up with a few of the Rubins' etchings but none of the paintings nor the pin. While admitting that he had stolen the paintings, he refused to return them, saying that "he didn't think it was necessary to have mercy on the wealthy Rubin, who had bank accounts in Switzerland." The police also discovered that he had participated in or performed twenty-three robberies in the six months since his release from prison.
Diller's exploits became tabloid fodder, and in the scribbler's imagination he became a Robin Hood, a postmodern "aristocratic burglar" and a "modern poet-philosopher" according to one writer, Uri Keisari. Diller's ascetic attributes and careful planning were reminiscent of a warrior monk's training, and many found it hard to hate a man who thumbed his nose at the bourgeois Israeli upper crust. In fact, the Kibbutznik burglar, said Keisari, was a victim "of bacteria from a disease that is spreading throughout the country. It is the disease of the quantity which is ruining the quality. The fenceless kibbutz is one of our last remaining fortresses. How long will these ideological monasteries last?"
The official report on the theft was long and broad. The police accused Diller - now Lidor - of stealing license plates, breaking into a ministry office to steal and forge ID cards, stealing fur and jewelry from apartments in Tel Aviv and even forging checks using a faked stamp. All told, he had stolen nearly of half a million dollars in property, although his exact proceeds were not known. He stored his plunder in various abandoned vans under tarps around town, a set of mobile safety deposit boxes that kept the goods away from his home and mother. Photographs taken from a stand of trees show him walking away from one of his vans, his face firm but with a slight crease of a smile on his lips.
During his trial, the defense brought in psychologists who claimed that Diller had a narcissistic and schizoid personality, albeit "one with very rich internal content and significant creative bonds, with the sensitivity of an artist." In 1972, a judge sent him back to prison and required psychological evaluations throughout. He began to see Dr. Ephraim Lehman, an Israeli psychologist who later moved to Germany and with whom Diller prepared his own lawyer-less appeal. His motion was dismissed by a judge who found that Diller's "ambition for superiority causes him to try to impose his will on society, and he does not accept its authority and laws."
Diller spent four more years in prison before again being released for good behavior. But this time, Nili Shamrat had grown tired of waiting and had left him, eventually marrying in the United States. He wrote that he missed her dearly: "One who I loved and planned on marrying, who continued to write beautiful letters to me during my second long incarceration, is gone and we could not turn the wheel backward when I was released." He told his parents he wanted to study vegan medicine, a controversial branch of medicine that avoided all animal products and focused on herbs and plants.
In the fall of 1977, Diller used his forgery skills to make a fake German passport. He made his own stamps from rubber blocks and wood and matched the inks, the typefaces, and photographic styles of other passports he had purchased or stolen. Using his phony passport, he travelled to Holland where, contrary to his stated intention to study medicine, he robbed an Amsterdam jewelry store. The Amsterdam police, being rather more proactive than their Israeli colleagues, grabbed him immediately and found a van nearby full of oxygen tanks. Although the Dutch authorities were at first confused by his passport, after running his fingerprints through Interpol they found that they had caught the notorious Diller. In fluid, slightly accented English and some Dutch, Diller explained that in a few short months he had completed eleven robberies and stolen four cars. He received another three years in prison.
This cycle of contrition and sin continued unabated. He met a woman named Julia Vilda who was a Dutch Christian missionary-until then. ("When she met Diller," Oded Janiv said later, "she was not a nun anymore.") She had been assigned to his prison to bring prisoners to Jesus. Instead, Diller brought her to him. When he got out in 1980, he lived with her as she tried to help him continue his studies in vegan medicine. That same year, he stole a car near a group of police officers and in the ensuing chase he hit a tree and was knocked out cold and injured. The Dutch authorities, tired of the Israeli's antics, sent him back to Jerusalem.
Julia came with him, wheeling Diller down the gangway and into the bustle of Tel Aviv, where they took an apartment in Yad Eliyahu. He thrashed around looking for a job, and finally settled on burning out the window grate of a bathroom in a local bank branch with an oxygen torch and trying to break into a heavily guarded ATM. He was arrested again, and he received one year.
Diller was forty-two and exhausted. His lawyer, Tzvi Lydski, called him a "lonely dog with a broken foot," and the formerly proud man was described as sitting with his "head bowed and his face unshaven" in court.125 "I am burdened by my defeat, my failures and my handicap," he said. "I am far from a saint, but I try to reach the level of a repentant person."
Apparently this play-acting worked, for he was soon released. He seemed to disappear for a while, visiting Holland and France, and he continued his diet and exercise regimens. In Tel Aviv, he lived at 20 Sokolov Street, a block of modern apartments on a quiet tree-lined street. His mother had bought him a flat there in the early 1980s. One relative recalls seeing him on a bus during this period, wearing a wig and with a new nose that had apparently "shrunk."
It seemed his cycle had been broken. After all of the bad blood, he appeared to become closer to his mother Arne, and by the 1990s he was able to rekindle his relationship with Nili Shamrat, calling her daily to wake her up at her home in California. She had divorced her first husband and now lived alone in an apartment in Tarzana, where she worked as a teacher and guidance counselor. Nili began to visit him every summer, spending months at his apartment on Sokolov Street or travelling with him through Europe. He seemed a changed person, no longer under the sway of his old impulses. He was neither rich nor penniless. He always seemed to be buying or selling something, a practice that Shamrat assumed was the source of his money.
By 2003, Diller's cancer had returned. He spent months in a Tel Aviv hospice, where he was visited by his mother and by Shamrat. On April 15, 2003, Na'aman and Nili were married by the Jerusalem Rabbinate. It was, coincidentally or not, the twentieth anniversary of the L.A. Mayer theft. Shamrat returned to the U.S. shortly after the wedding. She would not return for a little more than a year.
On April 13, 2004, Diller didn't call Nili to wish her good morning. By the 15th, she was worried, and she called Arne. One of his nephews, Arne told her, had found him at 20 Sokolov on the floor, "wallowing in his own excrement," and he was sent to the hospice at Tel Hashomer. Shamrat arrived in Jerusalem in time to see him lapse into unconsciousness. The cancer had spread a fiery path through his body and he died on the morning of April 20, 2004, his new bride and his mother by his side. His mother buried him at the cemetery at Ein Hahoresh, the community that had ousted him so many years before. He was sixty-five.