BACKDROP, diamond smugglers must feel right at home. Indeed, one of the people I met who was most at peace with himself was an Australian who would have seemed no more at home if weâd met in Sydney.
Jacob Singer is a friendly 50-ish man with a bushy salt-and-pepper mustache and tough, bright little eyes set in a relief-map face of creases and wrinkles. Heâs a popular figure in Freetown, itâs soon apparent, greeted from all street corners and by most passersby at the Solarâs open-walled outdoor bar. He returns all waves with a hearty greeting that mixes the indigenous Krio language with his own Australian idioms:
âHa de body?â
âNo bad.â
âWell, goodonya then.â
Less cheerful and popular, mostly due to his lack of English skills, is Valdy, his Polish companion. Muscular and handsome, Valdyâs bald white head is a beacon among Freetownâs African citizenry.
Except for the fact that they live at the Solar Hotel for months on end, it would be easy to mistake the two for UNAMSIL workers or bosses of a relief group. Both dress smartly and comfortably in shorts and polo shirts and wheel around town in a hired green Mercedes.
In fact, the two men are Mutt-and-Jeff diamond smugglers: Singer has the connections and does the talking; Valdy is the money man. In September 2001, they were struggling to string together a deal for $500,000 worth of rebel diamonds from Kono.
Diamonds are among the easiestâand by far the most valuable by weightâcommodities to smuggle. Three hundred grams of diamonds are equal in value to 40,000 pounds of iron ore, but only one of those commodities can be successfully smuggled in oneâs bowels. Millions of dollars worth of diamonds can be carried almost anywhere in the body or on it and they donât set off airport metal detectors. They can be sold quickly and they are virtually untraceable. This is one of the reasons there is no such thing as âconflict timberâ; rebels wishing to smuggle tropical lumber and sell it on the black market have a much harder time transporting and unloading their goods than rebels who deal in diamonds.
The most reliable way for smugglers to get diamonds out of Sierra Leone is to swallow them and hope to time their next bowel movements so that they can be retrieved with some amount of privacy. There is no possible way to detect the stones if theyâre inside your intestines, but the prospect of recovering them is unappealing and, besides, smuggling out one or two half-carat diamonds is easy enough without having to resort to such digestive measures. They can be carried in your breast pocket or a pack of cigarettes. There is no shortage of incredible tales of intrigue and deception when it
comes to diamond smuggling, probably because the tiny size of the contraband encourages ingenuity. In The Heart of the Matter, his novel about love and betrayal set in Sierra Leone, Graham Greene described Lebanese smuggling diamonds in the stomachs of live parrots. Ian Fleming, author of the James Bond series of novels, had his hero smuggle goods in Dunlop golf balls in Diamonds Are Forever. Over the years, people have carried thousands of dollars of stones inside the knots of their ties, in tins of fruit salad, in the false heels of specially made shoes. One woman who lost an eye in a car accident took the opportunity to hide diamonds in her empty socket, behind a glass eye.
Though it often seems to be so, smuggling isnât reserved to fringe characters covered in scars found sipping cheap gin in tropical airport lounges. It also occurs among the most elite in the diamond world. One prominent British diamond merchant was caught by Scotland Yard and fined back taxes for having illegally smuggled $2 million worth of polished goods from London to Belgium over a three-year period. He was only caught when police accidentally learned that heâd been robbed of $184,000 worth of goods, but hadnât
Jacob Singer is a friendly 50-ish man with a bushy salt-and-pepper mustache and tough, bright little eyes set in a relief-map face of creases and wrinkles. Heâs a popular figure in Freetown, itâs soon apparent, greeted from all street corners and by most passersby at the Solarâs open-walled outdoor bar. He returns all waves with a hearty greeting that mixes the indigenous Krio language with his own Australian idioms:
âHa de body?â
âNo bad.â
âWell, goodonya then.â
Less cheerful and popular, mostly due to his lack of English skills, is Valdy, his Polish companion. Muscular and handsome, Valdyâs bald white head is a beacon among Freetownâs African citizenry.
Except for the fact that they live at the Solar Hotel for months on end, it would be easy to mistake the two for UNAMSIL workers or bosses of a relief group. Both dress smartly and comfortably in shorts and polo shirts and wheel around town in a hired green Mercedes.
In fact, the two men are Mutt-and-Jeff diamond smugglers: Singer has the connections and does the talking; Valdy is the money man. In September 2001, they were struggling to string together a deal for $500,000 worth of rebel diamonds from Kono.
Diamonds are among the easiestâand by far the most valuable by weightâcommodities to smuggle. Three hundred grams of diamonds are equal in value to 40,000 pounds of iron ore, but only one of those commodities can be successfully smuggled in oneâs bowels. Millions of dollars worth of diamonds can be carried almost anywhere in the body or on it and they donât set off airport metal detectors. They can be sold quickly and they are virtually untraceable. This is one of the reasons there is no such thing as âconflict timberâ; rebels wishing to smuggle tropical lumber and sell it on the black market have a much harder time transporting and unloading their goods than rebels who deal in diamonds.
The most reliable way for smugglers to get diamonds out of Sierra Leone is to swallow them and hope to time their next bowel movements so that they can be retrieved with some amount of privacy. There is no possible way to detect the stones if theyâre inside your intestines, but the prospect of recovering them is unappealing and, besides, smuggling out one or two half-carat diamonds is easy enough without having to resort to such digestive measures. They can be carried in your breast pocket or a pack of cigarettes. There is no shortage of incredible tales of intrigue and deception when it
comes to diamond smuggling, probably because the tiny size of the contraband encourages ingenuity. In The Heart of the Matter, his novel about love and betrayal set in Sierra Leone, Graham Greene described Lebanese smuggling diamonds in the stomachs of live parrots. Ian Fleming, author of the James Bond series of novels, had his hero smuggle goods in Dunlop golf balls in Diamonds Are Forever. Over the years, people have carried thousands of dollars of stones inside the knots of their ties, in tins of fruit salad, in the false heels of specially made shoes. One woman who lost an eye in a car accident took the opportunity to hide diamonds in her empty socket, behind a glass eye.
Though it often seems to be so, smuggling isnât reserved to fringe characters covered in scars found sipping cheap gin in tropical airport lounges. It also occurs among the most elite in the diamond world. One prominent British diamond merchant was caught by Scotland Yard and fined back taxes for having illegally smuggled $2 million worth of polished goods from London to Belgium over a three-year period. He was only caught when police accidentally learned that heâd been robbed of $184,000 worth of goods, but hadnât
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