“A shocking amount of bullshit happens with big, rare stones” lizweil’s 2017 investigation into the fraught, twisted, unfortunate curse of the Bahia emerald is one of those stories that just has everything – the truth really is stranger than fiction.
Tony Thomas and Ken Conetto went to Brazil with a plan to buy $25 million worth of emeralds.in Tampa, Ferrara invited me to go with him on what he described as that day’s job. As far as I know, he isn’t a licensed PI, but the job was a stakeout. First we needed to secure what Ferrara called “a low-profile vehicle,” so from the Dunkin’ Donuts we stopped by a U-Haul store, where Ferrara rented a white pickup with an extended cab and excellent air-conditioning.
Biegler staged his own supposed kidnapping by a Brazilian warlord, sending word to Ferrara that he needed a ransom paid for his release. , which wrecked off the coast of Florida in 1622. The divers said the gems were rare Colombian emeralds, but they were just cheap emeralds treated with epoxy—and had been sitting on the ocean floor.In 2012 a Canadian gem merchant announced to the world that his 57,500-carat emerald was worth $1.15 million. He called it Teodora and put it up for auction. Turns out Teodora included a bunch of white beryl, dyed forest green.Cousins from Kentucky led Charles Tiffany of Tiffany & Co.
Ferrara’s life story is filled with pain. He told me his mother walked out when he was 4 and he didn’t see her again until he was 15. His younger sister died in childhood. His stepmother made him sleep with only sheets, not blankets, in the New Jersey winter. One day when he was walking home from an after-school job on a day that was –4 degrees, she drove by but didn’t pick him up. In 2004 his sister asked to borrow money. Ferrara told me that he gave her a few thousand dollars.
On the third day they knocked on Morrison’s door. His wife answered and said Morrison wasn’t home. As the detectives were talking to her, they saw a man walking around the side of the property and, figuring it was Morrison, tackled him. He turned out to be a cable repairman. Morrison’s wife got Morrison on the phone and he cut a deal with Miller and Gayman.
The court had great difficulty pinning down who owned the emerald or how much it was worth—or, really, any facts at all, because so many men contradicted one another under oath. This led an observer to the possibility that the stone was really a MacGuffin, in the classic Hitchcockian sense—an object that everyone’s chasing but that doesn’t really matter.
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