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National Geographic : 2002 Mar
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(Continuedfrom page 13) drive De Beers into headlong retreat from Angola and threaten its traditional control of Russian production. Changing its strategy in the face of the new competition, De Beers sold off half its five billion-dollar stockpile in 1999-2000. (Last year the Oppenheimers turned De Beers into a private company and ceased releasing such information.) Prices have fallen although they have not collapsed, suggesting that supply and demand do indeed apply to the diamond mar ket after all. In fact in late 2000 the De Beers sales team faced a shortage of rough stones and had to search for emergency supplies. CC IAMONDS are not really a com modity like gold or silver," a leading New York dealer explained to me one day. "You won't buy a stone from a jeweler and then sell it back to him for the same price-he's not going to give up his profit. But they are definitely the easiest way to move value around. I know a guy who had to leave Iran at a moment's notice during the rev olution there. No time to sell his house or get to the bank, but he had time to pick up 30 million dollars' worth of diamonds and walk away." "They are a form of currency," remarked Mark van Bockstael of the Diamond High Council in Antwerp. "They back international loans, pay debts, pay bribes, buy arms. In many cases they are better than money." Monrovia, capital of Liberia, for example, is known as a mecca for money launderers seeking to turn questionable cash assets into diamonds that can then be easily moved and sold elsewhere. There have been unconfirmed reports that Osama bin Laden's terrorist organization, al Qaeda, made use of this operation. As van Bockstael expounded on his favorite subject, we were strolling to lunch from his office in the city's diamond district, the heart of the world's diamond bazaar. Eighty percent of the world's rough gem-quality diamonds are traded every year along three short streets next to the Antwerp railroad station. The Antwerp district has extensions in many cities: West 47th Street in New York, London's Hatton Gar den, the high-rise offices of Ramat Gan in Tel Aviv, not to mention the Opera House district in Mumbai (Bombay) and the other "diamond cities" of India, where, in a union of modern technology and cheap labor, 800,000 workers craft stones weighing a fraction of a carat into polished gems. Each of these business centers revolves around personal contact and con nections, thrives on rumor and gossip, and cherishes secrecy. Multimillion-dollar deals are clinched with a handshake and the word mazal, Hebrew for "good luck." "So many secrets," sighed van Bockstael as we skipped to avoid a cyclist in a long black coat and a broad, flat, fur-trimmed hat. "Nothing is what it seems in the diamond business, and half the time you don't even know if that's true." Diamonds are conducive to secrets. With only some exceptions, they give no clue as to where on or in the Earth they originated. Although the industry is moving toward a sys tem for certifying the source of every diamond, the hundreds of millions of stones moving through the pipeline today are anonymous, shedding their history as they pass from rough to polished. But not always, as I discovered one afternoon in New York at the back of a well guarded workroom in the heart of the dia mond district in midtown Manhattan. There a master polisher named Motti Bernstein was working, bent over a scaife, a spinning disk that looks much like an old-fashioned record turn table. The surface of the scaife was coated with oil and diamond powder, and resting on the scaife as it spun was an oval diamond clamped at the end of a mechanical arm called a dop. Two months before, when this diamond first arrived in the workroom, it had been an opaque, semirectangular slab, fatter at one end than the other. In addition the stone had been "frosted," meaning that its interior-and any imperfections it might contain-was hidden until the first cut had been made. Bernstein lifted the dop and looked at the stone through his loupe. He did this every few minutes, as he has done with tens of thousands of stones in 30 years of working as a master cutter. Calculating the shape and size of pol ished gems that can be carved from a rough stone without losing too much material is the true art in cutting and polishing. For more than a month Bernstein had been patiently shaping this diamond into its present form, crafting its 58 facets so that light would reflect both from its surface and its heart. This was no ordinary diamond. "Never in my life did I work on something like this," he saidashehelditupformeto see. NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC, MARCH 2002
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