by Elizabeth Weil | illustrations by Tim McDonagh 3.02.17
Right now, in a vault controlled by the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, there sits a 752-pound emerald with no rightful owner. This gem is the size of a minifridge. It weighs as much as two sumo wrestlers. Estimates of its worth range from a hundred bucks to $925 million.
Eight years ago the emerald was logged into evidence by detectives Scott Miller and Mark Gayman of the Sheriff’s Major Crimes Bureau. The two men are longtime veterans: 30 years for Miller, 28 for Gayman. They dress as the Hollywood versions of themselves, in wraparound sunglasses, badges dangling off long chains. Among Gayman’s career highlights is the time he busted Joe Pesci’s ex-wife for the hit she put out on her new lover. One thing they both hate is the emerald case. It’s a whack-a-mole of schemers. Detangling all the rackets and lies is, Miller says, “a puzzle from hell.”
Emeralds invite stories—many of them dubious. At various points in history people have believed that emeralds were capable of protecting humans against cholera, infidelity, and evil spirits, and that an emerald placed under the tongue could transform a person into a truth-teller. This 752-pound emerald doesn’t quite fit under the tongue, and it appears to have had zero positive effects. Miller and Gayman got sucked into its orbit on October 8, 2008, when their sergeant forwarded a call. A man with a squeaky voice named Larry Biegler had phoned the cops in a little suburban California town called Temple City, just southeast of Pasadena. He told the officer on duty that his “840-pound” emerald (a lot of people say the emerald weighs 840 pounds, but it doesn’t) had been stolen and that he’d been abducted and released by the Brazilian Mafia. So the detectives climbed into what Miller calls his “mobile office” (a Chevy Blazer), drove 15 miles out to Temple City, and spent the day in the local police station parsing the emerald dossier. The case “was fun,” Miller told me, “at the beginning.”
A thing you should know is that emeralds are complicated. The chemical formula for an emerald is Be3Al2(Si6018). For the green crystals to form, beryllium must be heated to over 750 degrees Fahrenheit, under 7.5 to 21.75 tons of pressure per square inch, in the presence of chromium or vanadium. Given that beryllium exists only in tiny quantities near Earth’s crust, this seldom happens, and even when it does, the resulting crystals, or beryls, as they’re known, are not uniform. Almost all emeralds include cracks and inclusions, aka impurities. On the Mohs scale of hardness, emeralds score 7.5 to 8 out of 10. If you cut along a crack or inclusion, they shatter.
Diamonds, by contrast, are simple: pure carbon. The chemical formula for a diamond is C. Diamonds score a 10 on the Mohs scale. The trade is controlled by a few large players. There’s also a weekly international price sheet, the Rapaport Diamond Price List, that sets value based on the four c’s: carat, clarity, cut, and color. Diamond price is further stabilized by cartels that determine the quantity of gemstones released to market. Meanwhile, the emerald trade is controlled by hundreds of tiny players. The price is, to put it generously, flexible. An emerald costs what someone will pay. Period. The idea that diamonds are more romantic than emeralds is preposterous, a marketing ploy. Diamonds are a product like gold or crude oil: rational, conservative. Emeralds are Turkish rugs. When you buy one you believe that you’ve found a secret treasure and finagled a good deal. Then—weeks, months, years later—the truth comes out: You’ve been had. Time to grip up and face your wounded ego and foist the emerald upon the next guy.
The market is especially shifty for so-called specimen emeralds—those that are big and weird, destined for curio cases and natural history museums. The emerald in the Sheriff’s Department vault is called the Bahia emerald and it is the consummate specimen: huge, strange, and composed of such low-quality crystals that, were those crystals broken down into smaller rocks, gemologists would call them “fish tank emeralds.” The Bahia emerald, it must also be said, is not pretty. It’s a conglomerate, a geologic chimera—a bunch of large emerald crystals lodged at odd angles in a matrix of black schist. Imagine a petrified Jello mold made by Wilma Flintstone for a dinosaur.
Over the past 10 years, four lawsuits have been filed over the Bahia emerald. Fourteen individuals or entities, plus the nation of Brazil, have claimed the rock is theirs. A house burned down. Three people filed for bankruptcy. One man alleges having been kidnapped and held hostage. Many of the men involved say that the emerald is hellspawn but they also can’t let it go. As Brian Brazeal, an anthropologist at California State University Chico, wrote in a paper entitled The Fetish and the Stone: A Moral Economy of Charlatans and Thieves, “Emeralds can take over the lives of well-meaning devotees and lead them down the road to perdition.”
I too took a bad spin in the emerald’s orbit, pouring endless time into reporting this story, only, for a while at least, to become more confused rather than less. I read thousands of pages of court documents, including legal depositions that read like episodes of Drunk History. Larry Biegler hung up on me. The cops canceled the night before I was supposed to fly to go see them in LA. Then one day last summer my phone rang. “Hello! This is Jerry Ferrara!” a voice bellowed. Ferrara was one of the many people who claim the emerald ruined his life. He had declined to talk to me once before, but now he said he wanted to set the record straight. So he sent me a copy of his unpublished memoir, spent a few hours answering my initial questions, and invited me to visit him in Florida.
When we met, Ferrara brought along a “profiler” named Chrystal. “I call her a bullshit caller,” he said.
Jerry Ferrara is 50 years old, big, hairy, half-Sicilian, and huggable. He’s been gripped by the Bahia emerald for nine of the 16 years it’s been aboveground. The day I arrived in Tampa, he asked me to meet him at a Dunkin’ Donuts near Bottoms Down Weight Loss and signs advertising “$1 med days” and “Find your treasures at Peaches and Pearls Boutique.” He wore dad jeans, white sneakers, and a gray golf shirt. He sat down looking nervous, a little enraged, but also clean-shaven and earnest, like he was going to a job interview.
“The Brazilians are making my life difficult,” he said, referring to his ongoing emerald struggles. “But do I regret it? I don’t regret it.” He folded his hands on the table between us. They looked strong. “I lost my identity. I looked in the mirror and I didn’t recognize the guy staring back at me anymore.”