Businessmen, scammers and a startup fought for the gem, but no one got it.
At the end of May, a giant emerald weighing 272 kilograms was found in Brazil. How much can such a stone cost? Sixteen years earlier, a 340-kilogram Bahia emerald found nearby was estimated at almost a billion dollars. Fourteen people and one state fought for the right to own a giant gem, but no one got it. "Lenta.ru" figured out the intricate story of one of the largest emeralds in the world.
Karnaiba
At the beginning of 2001, garimpeiro prospectors crawled out of a tiny mine on a farm in the state of Bahia, and then pulled out from the ground not just a precious stone, but a whole block weighing more than 340 kilograms. Such large gems have never been seen in those places.
Brazilian emeralds are not of high quality. Usually they are charged at ten dollars per carat, that is, hundreds, if not thousands of times cheaper than stones that are mined in Colombia and Zambia. Selling large emeralds, oddly enough, is especially difficult. No one can say with certainty how much they cost. Ultimately, the price depends only on the amount of money the buyer has and the credibility of the seller, which is why emerald trade attracts crooks and scammers of all sorts like a magnet.
Someone offered the garimpeiro five thousand dollars, and they readily agreed: a tit in the hand is better than a pie in the sky. The stone was immediately resold for 20 thousand, then it changed the owner several times and eventually went to two businessmen from the city of São Paulo: the former bookseller Elson Ribeira and his partner Rui Saraiva. They hid the emerald in the garage and waited for the buyer.
Emerald Bahia. Photo: Reuters
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Silicon Valley
37-year-old American Anthony Thomas did not live in poverty. He had a small but successful construction business. During the dot-com boom, he invested more than $ 200,000 in a trendy California startup, Digital Reflection, which develops next-generation LCD displays. Every now and then, the TV showed Silicon Valley investors making billions from similar deals. The businessman hoped that he would get a piece of this pie too.
Little did he know that 2001 was a bad time for such hopes. In a few months, the investment bubble will deflate and hundreds of startups will go bankrupt. When Digital Reflection founder Wayne Cutlett approached him in July and hinted that the company urgently needed additional investment, Thomas decided that the situation could still be saved.
He recalled a conversation with Ken Conetto, a consultant he had worked with on his construction sites. Conetto liked to talk about the Brazilian emerald mines. Thomas and Cutlett contacted him and a plan was born. They decided to use Conetto's connections to buy emeralds at a bargain price, in fact, worth at least $ 25 million. On the security of stones, you can take a large loan and invest it in a highly profitable fund. This will help keep the startup afloat.
In September, the Americans flew to Sao Paulo. Conetto took Thomas to his Brazilian acquaintances - Ribeira and Saraiva. They showed him a 340kg emerald. “60 thousand dollars - and it's yours,” said one of the Brazilians.
A local gem specialist assured Thomas that nothing like this had ever been seen, even in international auction houses like Sotheby's. A similar gem is only in the British Museum, but it is worse. "I estimate the value of the Bahia emerald at $ 925 million," he concluded, adding: "I want to emphasize that this is a magnificent and rare find that deserves admiration."
The American businessman could not believe his luck. He claims that after returning to America, he immediately transferred 60 thousand dollars to the Brazilians and waited. The emerald was supposed to have been sent by mail, but the package never arrived. A few months later, Thomas asked Conetto to fly to Sao Paulo and find out the reason for the delay. Brazil reported that the stone had been shipped but lost on the way to California.
New Orleans
From Conetto's point of view, events developed differently. During the trial, which began several years later, he assured that in reality there was neither the money that Thomas is talking about, nor the agreement to send him by mail. According to him, the gem remained in Brazil legally and was stored in a reliable bank for three years.
In 2004, Conetto, the Brazilians and Catlett, who joined after the Digital Reflection bankruptcy, registered Gemworks Mining in Panama. After that, the Bahia emerald went to the United States. The package, with a declared value of $ 100, made it to San Jose without incident.
The partners tried to use the stone in all kinds of schemes of dubious legality. He wandered between a warehouse in San Jose, the office of lawyer Cutlett, and the vault of a former federal bank in New Orleans, where he was caught by Katrina - the most devastating hurricane in United States history. The elements broke through the dams that protected the city, the bank building flooded, and the giant emerald sank under water for several weeks.
11 kg emerald Theodore. Photo: Andy Clark / Reuters
The 858-carat Gachalá is considered one of the most famous emeralds in the world. Photo credit: thisisbossi / Flickr
A 2860-carat Colombian emerald bowl from the Hapsburg Treasury in Vienna. Photo: Maurice Savage / Alamy / Diomedia
Conetto soon met Larry Bigler. He claimed to be in real estate and came across as a wealthy and respectable man. The Bahia emerald immediately captivated him, but not with its beauty (the stone is strikingly ugly), but with the opening perspectives. Bigler had no doubt he would find a rich idiot who loved minerals more than dollars.
He convinced Conetto that he would be able to push the emerald, and promised him half the proceeds if he gave him a stone. Then Bigler found a gem dealer in New York and offered him 10 percent if he sold the gem for more than $ 25 million.
The merchant started a page on the online auction eBay and put the emerald up for sale with a starting price of $ 19 million. The lot was accompanied by a flowery story about Brazilian prospectors who dragged a precious stone through the jungle for several months, repelling the attacks of panthers. Despite this, the auction attracted only one bid. Bigler ordered it to be canceled and looked for other options.
El Monte
In November 2007, Bigler approached a bankrupt businessman named Jerry Ferrara to take over the business. At one time he traded in real estate, but then he lost everything and was forced to spend the night in the car. “It was just incredible,” Ferrara later recalled. -Bigler came with daddy and gave me the largest emerald in the world. He said he was looking for someone like me."
Bigler instructed him to meet Keith Morrison, an unpleasant Mormon from Idaho who wants to buy diamonds for $ 1.3 million. Ferrara negotiated a deal and promised to give him the Bahia emerald if something happens to the promised stones.
As a result, Morrison really did not receive the diamonds and the giant emerald became his property. He teamed up with Ferrara and Bigler to find a buyer together. Potential buyers were taken to a storage facility in El Monte, California, where the stone was kept.
The partners claim that Arab sheikhs and even the former chairman of the board of directors of the NASDAQ stock exchange Bernie Madoff asked the price for the Bahia emerald. He promised them $ 21 million in cash, $ 91 million in diamonds, and three wristwatches worth $ 15 million, if they are to be believed. Two days before the deal, he was arrested and charged with creating a pyramid scheme. Now he is in prison - serving a term of 150 years.
In June 2008, Bigler went missing. Soon, news came from him: he wrote that the Brazilian mafia had kidnapped him and begged for a ransom. Ferrara immediately suspected something was wrong. He began to understand and found out that Bigler was not at all a wealthy developer from California, as he claimed, but an ordinary plumber, and not particularly good: they complained on the Internet that he was taking money and doing nothing.
An angry Ferrara was quite convinced that the Brazilian mafia was also a fiction. A scam to extort money from him. He told Morrison about this, and they drove to El Monte. They managed to convince the manager to open the vault. The men pulled out the emerald, loaded it into a car, and took it to Las Vegas.
A few hours later, Bigler showed up in El Monte. He did not find the stone, called the police and reported the robbery.
Emerald weighing 272 kilograms, found in Bahia on May 22, 2017. Photo: Bahia Mineral Cooperative / AP
Las Vegas
The search for the emerald was entrusted to detectives Scott Miller and Mark Gaiman of the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department. “It was a funny thing,” Miller recalls. - At first.
They hunted down Bigler's missing partners for several weeks and eventually found Morrison. He agreed to hand over the emerald to law enforcement on the condition that both he and Ferrara remain at large. The detectives did not mind, but feared deception.
With a dozen cops armed with machine guns, Miller and Gaiman drove into Las Vegas in several cars. When they arrived, the local special forces were already waiting for them at the appointed place. A helicopter circled over the meeting place. Mormon did not lie. Morrison arrived in a tracksuit and handed over the giant emerald without resistance. As promised, he and Ferrara were not touched, and the gem was taken back to California and deposited in the police vault as evidence.
Figuring out who the Bahia emerald really belongs to was not easy. The longer the detectives tried to unravel this case, the more they hated it. "This is some kind of puzzle from hell," says Miller. There are almost two dozen actors in this story, and each one oppresses his own. As a result, the decision of the property issue was left to the court.
The litigation continued for almost ten years. Everyone was suing everyone - even that New York merchant who wrote fables about panthers and the jungle on eBay. While the proceedings were going on, Bigler disappeared again.
At one time the scales tipped in favor of Anthony Thomas, who paid $ 60,000 for the emerald, but he could not find the receipt. According to him, all proof of payment burned down with the house in 2006. As a result, Thomas' claims were rejected.
In 2013, Thomas filed an appeal. During the re-examination of the case, which had dragged on for several years, Ferrara and Morrison were able to convince the judge that they were right. On June 23, 2015, the Los Angeles Superior Court ruled that the Bahia emerald should become the property of FM Holdings, which they founded.
However, the story did not end there either. Brazil has declared its rights to the gem. The authorities of the country believe that the Bahia emerald was exported illegally and should be returned to its homeland. The US Department of Justice blocked the transfer of the gem to FM Holdings, but negotiations on the return of the stone dragged on.
Thomas filed for bankruptcy so as not to pay ruinous legal bills, Ferrara moonlights as a private detective, and Conetto shares a cluttered trailer with his 99-year-old mother and dreams of a big yacht and a castle in Dubrovnik. The 340-pound emerald that brought them together continues to gather dust in a police vault in Los Angeles.
Oleg Paramonov