12/2/2023 0 Comments Gems of war to catch a thief![]() ![]() People here think the diamonds belong to them." Mostert runs a diamond-recovery plant in the village of Port Nolloth for the South African company Trans Hex Group. "God put the diamonds here," says Frikkie Mostert, "and He put nothing else. In Namaqualand, stealing diamonds is the proper work of man. Not much happens in Namaqualand-except for the stealing of diamonds. Namaqualand's pan-hot desert and scraped little hills start north of Cape Town and run up to the Orange River, which forms the Namibian border. Less well known to the outside world, but infamous in the trade, is the steady flow of stolen diamonds from Namaqualand, a sandy slab of South Africa along the Atlantic coast. The Russians keep the rest for domestic polishing naturally, some of this joins the sea of smuggled gems. Bootlegged goods poured out of Russia, too, until 1997, when De Beers, the world's largest diamond-mining company, forged an agreement whereby Russia sells at least half its production to the London-based Central Selling Organization-some $550 million worth of rough each year. Hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of smuggled diamonds leave Angola every year. Perhaps this is inevitable-after all, General Motors doesn't have to worry that workers on the production line are swallowing doors, but a 10-carat stone goes down like a pea.Īs a result, the diamond trade is awash in contraband. Security is a ceaseless preoccupation: the global output of "rough," as uncut diamonds are called, is worth about $7 billion a year, and "leakage," or theft from the mining process, is relentless. Most diamonds come from big recovery plants-places fortified with razor wire, alive with arms, popping with the mechanized jets of air that blast the gems from streams of gravel rattling through the plants. They reportedly sold it for $9 million to middlemen, who are said to have sold it in turn to the Sultan of Brunei's brother for $20 million-this for a stone the size of a raisin. The buyers polished it into a 10-carat gem. They sold it at the diamond bourse in Johannesburg for $4.4 million. Still, so far so good.Ĭonsider this: Two years ago a pair of South African adventurers retrieved a 23-carat intense-pink fancy from the bottom of the Chicapa River, in Angola. Keenly aware of this, the diamond world harbors a secret fear that the trade itself might hit some hidden flaw and crumble. Gemstone diamonds have no intrinsic value their worth depends on the buyer's act of faith. Like the stones themselves, the diamond trade is highly unpredictable. "When we put in the next facet, the color jumped right back." Suddenly, as the cutter added a facet, the color changed from blue to light blue-from two hundred and sixty thousand dollars a carat to forty thousand dollars a carat." The dealer had been aiming for a four-carat finished stone: in an instant $880,000 evaporated before his eyes. "We started polishing, putting in facets. A blue is a "fancy," a category of nonwhite diamond the more vivid the color, the higher the price. "I'd bought a blue, a good sky-blue," a well-known Johannesburg diamond dealer told me. But sometimes a gem will burst into powder when a saw hits the skin of a structural flaw-a flaw that may be invisible even through the lens of an ordinary loupe. Henderson's cutters managed to salvage part of the diamond, keeping their losses under $20,000. ![]() Henderson gazed at the shattered gem as he continued: "We took a cut through the gletzes and had just started to polish off the hole when another gletz shot through the stone." A gletz is a visible flaw inside a diamond. "It had a hole in one side and two gletzes on the other," said Derek Henderson, the beefy, laconic Englishman who runs the operation. At a diamond cutter's in Johannesburg not long ago, a touch of the saw very nearly ruined an 8.5-carat stone. ![]()
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