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The World's Largest Emerald Shouldn't Exist
The World's Largest Emerald Shouldn't Exist
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Subtitles (273)
0:00
Throughout history, we’ve been obsessed with gemstones.
0:03
Trends have come and gone, but there are five types of
0:06
gems that we’ve always gravitated to: diamonds,
0:09
rubies, sapphires, amethysts and emeralds.
0:13
Diamonds might get the most attention,
0:14
but they’re not the rarest gems out there.
0:16
Of our big five shiny rocks, emeralds are particularly special since,
0:22
geologically speaking, they shouldn’t exist at all.
0:26
So when an emerald weighing a third of a ton turned up
0:30
on the market two decades ago, it caused some commotion.
0:34
At least fourteen different people, as well as the government of Brazil,
0:38
have laid claim to this mega-emerald.
0:41
And in all the legal hullabaloo, the rock itself got its a restraining order.
0:47
This is the story of the impossible, supposedly cursed Bahia Emerald.
0:55
[♪INTRO]
0:56
Emeralds have a history that stretches back more than 2,000 years.
1:00
Well, our history with them, anyway.
1:03
Their geological history is a lot older.
1:05
They’re famously associated with Cleopatra of Egypt, although
1:09
there’s actually very little evidence of her personally collecting them.
1:13
We do know that the mining of emeralds from Mons Smaragdus,
1:17
near the Red Sea coast of Egypt, began around the time of her reign.
1:21
For more than 1,500 years,
1:23
these mines were the main source of emeralds for the entire world,
1:28
making the gemstones incomparably rare.
1:31
That is, until the Spanish conquistadors arrived
1:33
in Colombia in the early 16th Century,
1:37
where they found the stones to be a favorite of
1:40
the indigenous groups living in Central and South America.
1:43
After the colonizers captured the mines there,
1:46
which I’m sure they did in a chill and not war-crime-adjacent way,
1:51
they started shipping crates of emeralds to Europe.
1:54
Even with this new discovery, though,
1:56
emeralds remained rare and highly prized.
1:58
Because, like we said in the beginning,
2:01
they basically shouldn’t exist.
2:03
According to the laws of geology,
2:06
there is no way that emeralds should be able to form.
2:09
The emerald, of course, crystallizes anyway,
2:11
because emeralds don’t care what humans think is possible.
2:15
Anyways. These hexagonal and prismatic gemstones are a variety
2:20
of the mineral beryl, colored green by chromium and vanadium.
2:25
But here’s the thing.
2:26
To make one of these, you need to combine elements that
2:29
are normally found in completely different parts of the Earth.
2:33
Beryllium, the necessary component of any beryl,
2:37
lives in the upper crust.
2:38
It’s a relatively small metal ion that slips easily out of most crystals,
2:44
so when a molten magma is cooling,
2:46
beryllium is only trapped in the minerals left behind at the very top
2:51
because everything else has solidified and it has nowhere left to go.
2:55
On the other hand, chromium and vanadium
2:57
are deep earth metals, found in the mantle.
3:01
These metal ions are large and highly charged,
3:04
which means they’re trapped easily and sit nicely
3:07
in a bunch of dense minerals that form early
3:10
on from cooling magma, and stay deep down.
3:14
The separation between high crustal beryllium,
3:17
and deep mantle chromium and vanadium can
3:20
often be many tens or even hundreds of kilometers,
3:25
so getting the two together in a single
3:27
crystal should basically never happen.
3:30
And yet, somehow it does. And when emeralds do form,
3:34
they can be spectacular.
3:36
Which brings us to the star of our show,
3:39
the only rock with its own restraining order.
3:42
The Bahia emerald, named after the region in Brazil where it
3:45
was found, is the largest emerald specimen /ever/ discovered.
3:50
It’s not a single crystal, but instead consists of several fat,
3:54
deep green, hexagonal prisms embedded in
3:57
a chunk of rock around 90 centimetres across at its widest.
4:01
Together, the whole thing weighs 340 kilograms,
4:06
and it contains some of the largest emerald crystals ever found.
4:10
But if you’re hoping to get a look at this
4:11
impressive specimen in person, you’re out of luck.
4:14
Because the Bahia emerald has been sitting in a high security
4:18
vault somewhere in Los Angeles for more than a decade.
4:22
Most people think it’s still there, but it also might be in Brazil.
4:27
I’ll get to that in a bit.
4:28
And also, the thing might be cursed.
4:33
Bum-bum-buuuuuum!
4:34
The case of this emerald begins in 2001 in the
4:38
Carnaìba mining district in Bahia, northeastern Brazil.
4:42
Two American businessmen, Tony Thomas and Ken Conetto
4:46
had flown to the area in a last-ditch effort to save their failing start up.
4:50
The plan? Acquire $25 million worth of emeralds,
4:54
and use them as collateral for a $100 million loan,
4:58
to buy into an investment opportunity that promised huge returns.
5:02
But when they got to Brazil, they found out
5:05
that the shop where they were supposed to check out
5:07
millions of dollars of precious stones was a total dump.
5:11
The Brazilian dealers tried to rescue the deal, and took the two
5:15
Americans to see something that might tempt them to invest.
5:18
Under a tarp, in a carport in one of the miners’ homes,
5:22
was the Bahia emerald. The asking price was $60,000.
5:28
And now, this is where things get… sketchy.
5:31
A month later, Thomas wired the Brazilians $60,000.
5:35
He said it was to buy the Bahia Emerald,
5:38
but court documents record it as payment for the initial
5:41
smaller emeralds they’d gone to Brazil for in the first place.
5:45
Thomas then claimed that the Bahia emerald went missing in transit.
5:50
And he didn’t file a theft report…. For some reason.
5:54
But that was a lie, since it arrived in San Jose,
5:58
California in 2005, and was picked up by Ken Conetto.
6:03
And how do you ship the world’s largest emerald?
6:06
FedEx, obviously. I hope they got package insurance.
6:10
When the sender filled out the customs forms,
6:12
they declared that the box just held an ordinary rock,
6:15
or possibly a piece of concrete. Reports disagree,
6:19
but its value was listed as somewhere
6:21
between $100 and literally nothing.
6:25
Now, we don’t know if customs officials
6:27
actually looked at the parcel at all.
6:28
But even if they had, they could have been
6:31
fooled into thinking it was just a chunk of stone.
6:33
Because while it contained gigantic gemstone-quality
6:36
emeralds on one side, a big portion of it is just a big, black rock.
6:41
If they opened the box and only saw that side,
6:44
well, who’d think that was worth anything?
6:46
To the untrained eye, it wouldn’t be much to write home about.
6:49
But to a geologist, it’s a huge clue as to how
6:52
the giant emeralds it contains came to be.
6:55
Remember: these things should be impossible,
6:57
thanks to that separation between their main ingredients,
7:01
beryllium and chromium.
7:02
But sometimes, the Earth conspires to do
7:05
something strange, with beautiful results.
7:08
In Bahia, the ancient basement bedrock is made
7:10
from very dark colored, very iron-rich, ‘ultramafic’ rocks.
7:15
These come from the deepest crust,
7:17
so they contain high concentrations of chromium.
7:20
Element number one, check.
7:21
Over time, the bedrock rose up through the crust,
7:24
until more than 2 billion years ago,
7:27
it was intruded by a massive blob of magma
7:29
that contained large amounts of beryllium.
7:32
Element number two, check.
7:35
But for the most part, these two elements were still in their own lanes,
7:39
chromium in the dark rock, and beryllium in the lighter intrusion.
7:43
Except in one very special zone around the edge of that intrusion.
7:48
Here, the molten magma heated up the pre-existing
7:50
host rock right next to it and cooked it into a completely
7:55
new kind of rock with a new mineral makeup,
7:58
in a process known as contact metamorphism.
8:02
Crucially, during this cooking process,
8:04
fluids flowed between the two bubbles,
8:07
allowing elements to migrate and intermix.
8:10
And that’s how beryllium and chromium finally came together
8:13
and made a unique hybrid crystal that we call an emerald.
8:18
So the chunk of magmatic rock that arrived in California
8:22
could have easily been as worthless as the customs form said,
8:26
if not for this geological quirk.
8:28
Instead, we have a gemstone so rare and massive
8:31
that it’s hard to even figure out what it’s worth.
8:34
Which was a problem for Conetto.
8:37
After it arrived in California, the Bahia
8:39
emerald changed hands a few times.
8:41
But figuring out precisely where it went
8:43
and who owned it proved to be a huge challenge.
8:47
Tony Thomas claimed ownership of the gem,
8:49
citing the $60,000 he’d sent to Brazil.
8:52
But when asked by authorities to produce the bill of sale,
8:55
he declared it lost when his house burned down.
8:58
The house fire did happen,
9:00
but whether the evidence was really inside…
9:03
well, let’s just say that no one was convinced.
9:06
Conetto, still working on behalf of the failed startup
9:09
that started all of this, moved the stone from
9:11
San Jose to a storage facility in New Orleans.
9:15
However, it arrived just in time to be caught up in Hurricane Katrina,
9:20
and it was trapped underwater for weeks when the city flooded.
9:23
Conetto later made a deal with a potential
9:25
middle-man named Larry Biegler,
9:28
who made a deal with a gem and real estate dealer in Florida.
9:32
That guy tried to use the emerald as collateral for selling diamonds.
9:36
But then when Florida gems guy couldn’t actually
9:39
source the diamonds for the deal, the emerald was
9:41
forfeited to of all people, a Mormon from Idaho.
9:46
Are you keeping up?
9:48
At this point, the Bahia emerald was in El Monte, California,
9:52
and Mr. Florida and Mr. Idaho were working together to find a buyer.
9:57
But then in 2008, Biegler disappears, sending Mr. Florida word
10:02
that he had been kidnapped by Brazilian warlords,
10:05
and needed a ransom for his release.
10:08
Now I’m gonna fast forward through some of the details here,
10:10
but this whole debacle ends when someone reports the
10:13
Bahia emerald as stolen property and gets the cops involved.
10:17
Mr. Florida and Mr. Idaho agreed to hand over the emerald,
10:21
on the condition that they would not be arrested.
10:23
And with the help of a SWAT team and helicopter,
10:26
the L.A. county sheriff’s department took the gem into custody.
10:31
So there it sat while the courts tried to untangle the Gordian knot of
10:35
lawsuits and counter-suits to find out who actually owned the stone.
10:40
Another problem was that the court needed to determine
10:43
what the thing was worth, and that wasn’t exactly easy.
10:47
Unlike other gemstones, where their value is usually linked
10:50
to their size and purity, emeralds are almost never pure.
10:54
Because of the chaotic way they’re formed,
10:56
they typically contain networks of imperfections and inclusions,
11:00
which are known to gemologists as jardin.
11:03
A stone’s jardin are proof that the stone is authentic.
11:06
But these imperfections also mean that emeralds aren’t that durable.
11:10
So emeralds with lots of jardin are more likely to break
11:13
when set into jewelry, and are therefore less valuable.
11:16
All of that means that their value is really subjective.
11:20
But ultimately, an emerald is only worth what someone will pay for it.
11:24
So what would someone actually pay for a 340 kilogram emerald?
11:28
The lowest non-zero number is $60,000, since that’s
11:32
what Thomas paid for it at the start of this whole thing.
11:35
But Mr. Idaho put down $1.3 million for a stake in selling it…
11:40
And a New York gem dealer wanted to auction it with a minimum
11:43
bid of $19 million, or a bargain buy-it-now price of $75 million.
11:50
On eBay, of all places.
11:53
One potential buyer offered $127 million
11:57
in a combination of cash, diamonds, and watches.
12:01
That man’s name? Albert Einstein.
12:04
No, I’m just kidding, but it was Bernie Madoff.
12:08
After eight years of painful legal proceedings,
12:11
the judges from the LA Superior Court made
12:14
a tentative ruling in the favor of Mr Florida and Mr Idaho,
12:18
as they came closest to demonstrating a clear title.
12:22
But before the case of the cursed emerald could be finalized,
12:25
everything was turned on its head again,
12:27
as the government of Brazil entered the ring.
12:30
See, the two Brazilian dealers never got mining rights
12:33
for the region of Brazil they were working in.
12:36
So according to the authorities, they had no rights
12:39
to the giant rock they offered to Thomas and Conetto.
12:42
Brazil wanted to reclaim this piece of
12:44
their heritage which they saw as being stolen.
12:48
And just days after the LA Superior Court made their
12:51
decision to award the stone to Mr. Florida and Mr. Idaho,
12:55
the Department of Justice issued a restraining order.
12:59
Not on Conetto or Thomas or even the new owners, though.
13:02
On the emerald itself.
13:04
Which sounds odd. Like, those are normally for people, not rocks.
13:09
But there’s an obscure procedural thing that allows the
13:12
US government to file a restraining order on someone’s
13:15
private property if there’s a foreign government
13:18
that has laid claim to that thing.
13:21
So it basically stops a person from taking
13:23
their property and fleeing into the night,
13:26
since there’s some kind of pending
13:28
international claim to that thing.
13:30
In this case, the Bahia emerald.
13:33
After the restraining order, the Bahia emerald stayed
13:35
locked away in a vault in the LA Sheriff’s Department.
13:39
In 2024, the court finally ruled in favor of the Brazilian government.
13:44
The U.S. government said it would repatriate the stone
13:47
back to Brazil so it can be displayed in a museum.
13:50
Except… they haven’t quite managed that yet.
13:54
As of 2026, which is 25 years after this saga started,
13:58
there’s been no repatriation ceremony, no news reports,
14:02
and no appearances of the legendary cursed Bahia emerald.
14:07
In fact, only a few people have ever seen it in person.
14:10
As far as we know, after making its way across America,
14:14
entrancing gem dealers and wreaking havoc on lives
14:18
for a quarter century, the Bahia emerald is still
14:21
gathering dust in a high security vault somewhere in LA.
14:25
So that’s where this story ends, at least for now.
14:29
And hey, if this wild tale has you wishing
14:32
for your own emeralds, you’re in luck.
14:34
This month’s Rocks Box subscribers are getting their
14:38
own raw Bahia emerald in the mail.
14:42
Legal ones. We checked.
14:43
Every month, Rocks Box subscribers get a mineral
14:46
or fossil sample delivered right to their door.
14:50
If you want to learn more, head over to Complexly.store/rocks
14:54
to poke around, peruse a selection of some of our most popular
14:59
Rocks Box specimens, or check out the
15:02
rest of our cool Rocks Box merch.
15:05
Thanks for watching!
15:12
[♪OUTRO]
