{"id":1661,"date":"2018-01-09T16:00:09","date_gmt":"2018-01-09T16:00:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/niemanstoryboard.org\/2018\/01\/09\/annotation-tuesday-elizabeth-weil-and-the-curse-of-the-bahia-emerald\/"},"modified":"2024-11-15T14:19:15","modified_gmt":"2024-11-15T14:19:15","slug":"annotation-tuesday-elizabeth-weil-and-the-curse-of-the-bahia-emerald","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/niemanstoryboard.org\/2018\/01\/09\/annotation-tuesday-elizabeth-weil-and-the-curse-of-the-bahia-emerald\/","title":{"rendered":"Annotation Tuesday: Elizabeth Weil and \u201cThe Curse of the Bahia Emerald\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":" \n
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\n \nElizabeth Weil, a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine and Outside, says she doesn’t write about \u201csuper important\u201d things. But her warm and captivating voice has animated every subject she’s chosen to tackle over her 22-year career writing for magazines. An inveterate generalist, she says her stories have tended to follow her own interests in life: maternity issues when her kids were small, education when her kids started school, science and sports because she likes them.
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\nHer story on \u201cThe Curse of the Bahia Emerald<\/a>,\u201d published in Wired in March, came out of a crime story phase a couple years ago. It’s a surreal saga about a cast of wacky characters fighting over who owns a 752-pound emerald from Brazil, which could be worth $925 million or virtually nothing. It has all the trappings of caper film meets slapstick. (Calling the Coen brothers.)
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\nI talked to her about writing this kooky tale, finding her voice and what \u201ccontributing writer\u201d really means. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
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\nThis is a pretty weird story. How did it come about?<\/strong>
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\nI was trolling for story ideas, reading the crime section of the Los Angeles Times. I had only ever written two crime stories, and I wanted to find one that was human and funny. There was a news story about the Bahia Emerald, and I thought it was so crazy that there was this giant emerald, and no one knew who owned it. I talked to a lawyer representing some of the people involved to write the pitch, and off I went. Then it was impossible to report.
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\nWhat do you mean?<\/strong>
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\nIt was so hard to learn anything. It was complicated and confusing, and none of the principals would talk to me. The lawyer I talked to originally had told me his clients would talk, but they didn\u2019t. I got some court documents, and people’s testimony under oath was contradictory. I got in touch with Brendan Borrell, who’d written about the emerald for Bloomberg, and he said: \u201cThis story is a nightmare. You should run.\u201d He sent me tons of primary documents\u2014in a way, I had too many. And it was clear by that point that the emerald wasn’t worth nearly as much as people were saying. I wrote a draft for the Times, but they ended up suggesting I take it elsewhere. I ended up writing it for Maria Streshinsky<\/em> at Wired. In the meantime, Jerry Ferrara [one of the men involved in the emerald escapade] called me and was like, “I’ll talk to you now.”
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\nYou mentioned Jerry was \u201cyour kind of character.\u201d What kind is that?<\/strong>
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\nPoignant and emotional. I really like a tough guy who’s not actually tough and is kind of open about it.
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\nIt seemed clear that some of the things your characters told you was BS or sort of pie-in-the-sky. How do you approach reporting with potentially untrustworthy sources? <\/strong>
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\nI’ve found that if you’re going to use it, you just have to be totally clear that it’s not that credible. Like \u201cthis is a person telling you this story,\u201d not \u201cthis is a set of facts.\u201d When I was initially trying to write the story in a straighter way, it was hard because it just didn’t add up. It wasn’t ever going to make sense to take details from many different places, like you would in a normal story where people are telling the truth, and recreate some event. It had to be a story about these people who are all insane, and that had to be a feature of the piece instead of trying to hide it. Often if something isn’t working, it’s better to lean into weirdness and not try to cover it up. The reader can feel it if your voice is tentative.
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\nDo you outline your stories before you write?<\/strong>
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\nSort of. I try to figure out what the sections might be on a piece of paper, often on a plane ride home. Once I’m back in my office, I start filling in notes, usually from memory at first. I keep doing that until the story is done, then I go to my notes and transcripts and make the notes more and more precise. I think: \u201cDoes this feel right? What would need to happen here to get it to feel right?\u201d It’s very intuitive. I’ll often end up with a document that’s as long as the story but not in full sentences, just bits of language that are voicey, notes and quotes. A lot of the way I think about stories is in the voice and in the emotional arc.
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\nDo you feel like your voice changes across stories and publications?<\/strong>
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\nCertain publications have different thresholds for how voicey they want things, but I feel like it has changed more over time than publication to publication. I’m much more interested in voice now. When I look at my earlier stuff, it’s not very interesting to me anymore. By voice, I mean character and emotion. It’s another layer of how to read the story that you’re telling. I almost never write about things that are actually super important in the world, so part of what I’m doing is entertaining people. It’s the fun part to me now.
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\nCan someone actively develop their voice, and if so, how?<\/strong>
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\nThat\u2019s a good question. First-person writing obviously helps, because it’s clear that you have the authority to have whatever voice you want if you’re writing as yourself. I think it helps you get into that groove and then sort of spreads. Some of it, I think, is feeling like you have the right to have a voice, as opposed to just relaying the facts, even if you’re writing about events in other people\u2019s lives.
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\nBesides reading the crime section of the LA Times, how do most of your story ideas come to you?<\/strong>
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\nReading stuff like smaller, particularly non-New York papers. Because I live in California and don’t want to travel all the time, I like to find local stories. I feel like there’s a part of my brain, for better or worse, that just has this filter on in conversation and reading, all the time.
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\n\nWhen do you decide to say, \u201cYes, I’m going to pursue this story\u201d? Is it enough to feel like you can sell it, or does it have to meet certain criteria? <\/strong>
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\nI have to want to write it now. I have to think that it can be good. I think a ton of freelancers have picked stories and been assigned stories that were never going to be that good. They just didn’t have the right mix of stuff. I think: Am I still interested enough to do the reporting to write a good pitch? A lot of stories fall apart just in trying to write a decent pitch.
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\nI think many people are curious: What does the title of contributing writer actually mean?<\/strong>
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\nIt means different things at different places. At The Times Magazine, it means you have a contract that lays out how many stories you’re going to do per year and what your fees will be. But you only get paid if you do the stories. They don’t have to assign them to you, and you might do more stories. It’s kind of a guess about how much work you might do, and then what you actually do is separate. With Outside it’s just kind of, \u201cWe like you.\u201d There’s no commitment.
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\nDo people ask for that title, or do editors have to offer it?<\/strong>
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\nI asked for both of them. I think people should ask for stuff, especially young women.\u00a0Those things matter if you’re a freelancer. It matters for credibility, and it matters to me emotionally to feel like there is some form to my independent contractor life.
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The Curse of the Bahia Emerald<\/a><\/h2>\n\n

By Elizabeth Weil<\/em><\/h3>\nWired. March 2017<\/em>
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\nRight now, in a vault controlled by the Los Angeles County Sheriff\u2019s Department, there sits a 752-pound emerald with no rightful owner. This gem is the size of a mini-fridge. It weighs as much as two sumo wrestlers. Estimates of its worth range from a hundred bucks to $925 million. <\/a>Tell me about the decision to start with the emerald, rather than the action surrounding it. Were you trying to establish the stone as a character in itself? Also, I love the comparisons you used to illuminate size. Do you come up with these intuitively or sit there Googling how much the average sumo wrestler weighs?<\/span> Haha. No sitting around Googling, but a lot of staring at pictures of the emerald and meanwhile procrastinating and seeing a post from a friend about going to a sumo match. But to answer your question, I wanted to start with the emerald because that\u2019s the hook, or at least it was for me: How is it possible that something this huge and (purportedly) this valuable has no rightful owner?<\/span><\/span>
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\nEight years ago the emerald was logged into evidence by detectives Scott Miller and Mark Gayman of the Sheriff\u2019s 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. <\/a>ED: Such a great description.<\/span><\/span> Among Gayman\u2019s career highlights is the time he busted Joe Pesci\u2019s ex-wife for the hit she put out on her new lover. One thing they both hate is the emerald case. It\u2019s a whack-a-mole of schemers. Detangling all the rackets and lies is, Miller says, \u201ca puzzle from hell.\u201d
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\nEmeralds invite stories\u2014many 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\u2019t quite fit under the tongue, and it appears to have had zero positive effects. <\/a>Why did you want to bring in this mystical element up front, before going into the story of the Bahia Emerald?<\/span> I wanted to get the \u201cemeralds are weird\u201d storyline going early, so readers would know this isn\u2019t going to be a regular crime caper.<\/span> <\/span> 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. <\/a>Where is the detail about his \u201csqueaky voice\u201d from, since it doesn’t sound like you interviewed Biegler?<\/span> I didn\u2019t interview him, but I heard tapes of him.<\/span><\/span> He told the officer on duty that his \u201c840-pound\u201d emerald (a lot of people say the emerald weighs 840 pounds, but it doesn\u2019t) had been stolen and that he\u2019d been abducted and released by the Brazilian Mafia. So the detectives climbed into what Miller calls his \u201cmobile office\u201d (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 \u201cwas fun,\u201d Miller told me, \u201cat the beginning.\u201d
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\nA 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\u2019s crust, this seldom happens, and even when it does, the resulting crystals, or beryls, as they\u2019re 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. <\/a>This paragraph and the next two give quite a bit of background, including some detailed chemistry. Why did you think it was necessary to get into the weeds on this and to include it so close to the top?<\/span> This was partly the editor\u2019s choice; my early drafts did not have this material up high. But Wired is science-y, and more to the point, the chemistry could also help bolster the story, or \u201cemerald character\u201d: Emeralds are impure. Emeralds are contradictory. Emeralds crack.<\/span><\/span>
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\nDiamonds, 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\u2019s also a weekly international price sheet, the Rapaport Diamond Price List, that sets value based on the four c\u2019s: 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\u2019ve found a secret treasure and finagled a good deal. Then\u2014weeks, months, years later\u2014the truth comes out: You\u2019ve been had. Time to grip up and face your wounded ego and foist the emerald upon the next guy. <\/a>Why was comparing emeralds to diamonds useful?<\/span> This was also about setting up the \u201cemerald character\u201d and the nature of the piece. This is a really weird story! I wanted to make sure readers were going to be ready for that. If you go into this hoping for a straight crime piece, you\u2019re going to be very disappointed on a lot of levels.<\/span><\/span>
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\nThe market is especially shifty for so-called specimen emeralds\u2014those that are big and weird, destined for curio cases and natural history museums. The emerald in the Sheriff\u2019s 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 \u201cfish tank emeralds.\u201d The Bahia emerald, it must also be said, is not pretty. It\u2019s a conglomerate, a geologic chimera\u2014a 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. <\/a>Love this! Were you consciously trying to add humor to the piece?<\/span>Yes! This story is essentially a comedy. Maria Streshinsky, the editor, also gets a lot of credit for that line. I had the petrified Jello mold in there for a long time, and I think she added Wilma.<\/span><\/span>
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\nOver 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\u2019t let it go. <\/a>Why was it worth including this summary at the risk of giving things away?<\/span>Again, the story is a disappointment unless you\u2019re primed for what you\u2019re getting into. This isn\u2019t a story about a very important gemstone; this is a story about hapless, poignant conmen who can\u2019t let go.<\/span><\/span> 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<\/em>, \u201cEmeralds can take over the lives of well-meaning devotees and lead them down the road to perdition.\u201d
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\nI too took a bad spin in the emerald\u2019s 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<\/em>. 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. \u201cHello! This is Jerry Ferrara!\u201d 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. <\/a>Do you often write about your reporting process? Why was it needed here?<\/span> I\u2019m a fan of judicious first-person. It\u2019s another layer. Jerry\u2019s desire to tell me about his experience, and the way he told it, became a real part of the story.<\/span><\/span>
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\nJerry Ferrara is 50 years old, big, hairy, half-Sicilian, and huggable. <\/a>I love that your descriptions are so unpretentious and reflect your voice. How did you get comfortable with describing people as plain \u201cold\u201d and \u201chairy,\u201d or even \u201chuggable,\u201d which injects a personal point of view?<\/span> It\u2019s all personal! Even when you pretend it\u2019s not. I also felt like readers needed to know that I was telling them the truth, not overselling or prettying things up, because so many people in this story are compulsive liars. (For a long time, in the draft I described Jerry as looking like a life-sized mafia don plush toy, but the editors made me take that out.)<\/span><\/span> He\u2019s been gripped by the Bahia emerald for nine of the 16 years it\u2019s been aboveground. The day I arrived in Tampa, he asked me to meet him at a Dunkin\u2019 Donuts near Bottoms Down Weight Loss and signs advertising $1 MED DAYS and FIND YOUR TREASURES AT PEACHES AND PEARLS BOUTIQUE. <\/a>I’m reading Lucia Berlin’s A Manual for Cleaning Women, <\/em>and she often uses signs just this way in her stories\u2014they communicate so much! Is this a common technique for you? What other scenic details have you found speak volumes?<\/span>I think signs work well because, of course, there are a million signs around, and you can pick the ones that forward your narrative. I used to use this device more than I do now. It\u2019s the same with song lyrics: They can do a lot of work for you. But I\u2019m pretty sensitive to writers using that device now. It\u2019s easy to overdo it or think it works better for the reader than it really does.<\/span><\/span> 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.
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\n\u201cThe Brazilians are making my life difficult,\u201d he said, referring to his ongoing emerald struggles. \u201cBut do I regret it? I don\u2019t regret it.\u201d He folded his hands on the table between us. They looked strong. \u201cI lost my identity. I looked in the mirror and I didn\u2019t recognize the guy staring back at me anymore.\u201d
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\nFerrara brought along a skinny woman named Chrystal (in the movie version of all this, she\u2019d be played by Uma Thurman), whom he introduced as a \u201cprofiler,\u201d meaning that she judges character. \u201cI call her a bullshit caller,\u201d he said. They told me there are 14 different personalities. When I asked Chrystal about Jerry\u2019s type, he answered before she could. \u201cShe\u2019s going to say I\u2019m an asshole.\u201d
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\nA few minutes later, Ferrara excused himself to get coffee. I asked Chrystal, who had a tasteful purple streak in her hair and wore an emerald necklace, what she really did think about Ferrara\u2019s character.
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\nShe glanced at the older woman doing a crossword puzzle next to us as she searched for words. \u201cI\u2019m trying to do this in a way that doesn\u2019t make him look bad,\u201d she said. \u201cSometimes he\u2019s had to do bad things to protect himself and the people he cares for.\u201d <\/a>Her response is so telling. Did you push her on what she meant?<\/span> I don\u2019t think I pushed her after this. I didn\u2019t want to break the little trust we had established. We\u2019d just met like ten minutes before.<\/span><\/span>
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\nFerrara first heard about the Bahia emerald in a low moment. It was November 2007. He was sleeping in his car, scamming free continental breakfasts at hotels for his two daughters, who were sleeping on their aunt\u2019s floor. For the prior seven years he\u2019d been supporting his family through his business, Honest Father Buys Houses, which purchased and resold homes and commercial properties. But then the bottom fell out of the real estate market. Ferrara lost everything, and he started working to right the ship of his life, he says, by selling foreclosed real estate portfolios for Lehman Brothers. When those deals fell through too, Ferrara, frantic, called every broker and every investor he could dial. Eventually, he says, he wound up on the phone with a man named Larry Biegler. (Remember him, of the phone call to the Temple City cops?) <\/a>Why did it seem that readers would need a reminder at this point?<\/span>Everybody got so confused reading drafts of this story. There were so many characters, and they all had sort of similar names. The story really had too much plot. One of the hardest parts of writing it was figuring out how to streamline, what could be left out.<\/span><\/span>Biegler wasn\u2019t really interested in foreclosed property. But he needed someone to help sell a giant emerald.
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\nThe rock had already been through a lot. The Bahia emerald was unearthed in early 2001 from the Carnaiba mine of the Brazilian state of Bahia. Then, according to some (apocryphal) tellings of the emerald\u2019s history, the mule team dragging it through the rain forest was attacked by panthers\u2014or some other animal\u2014and the miners themselves had to carry the 752-pound emerald the rest of the way to civilization. From town it was trucked south to S\u00e3o Paulo and placed under a tarp in a carport at one of the mine owners\u2019 homes. Those miners, it turned out, had a friend and business associate in San Jose, California. His name was Ken Conetto.
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\nA word about Conetto: Like Ferrara, he\u2019s half-Sicilian and has spent his life looking for deals. He once held the titles to some silica mines in Nevada but never struck it rich. In fact, for the past 11 years, he has lived in a trailer with his mother, Gertrude, who is now 99. Strewn about are half a dozen pairs of eyeglasses, 10 dog leashes, six La-Z-Boy chairs, more pillboxes than I could count, a giant box of Wheaties with Steph Curry on the front, four bicycles, 10 fleece blankets, three television sets (two on).\u00a0 <\/a>Why did you include these specific counts?<\/span> Specific is always good, right? Plus it was just so crazy and chaotic in there. I wanted to capture that, as a way to capture him.<\/span><\/span>When I visited he offered me coffee cake, oranges, and bottled water and told me to come back whenever I wanted, a kindness unparalleled by many people I call friends. His mind drifts when he talks. The plots he spins can be hard to follow. If he ever comes into real money, he told me, he\u2019s going to buy a big boat, a tri-hull that will do 50 knots\u2014\u201cI won\u2019t be hors d\u2019oeuvres for a shark!\u201d He\u2019s then going to sail that boat up the Adriatic coast and move into the castle he once saw in Dubrovnik. When his tough-guy veneer falls, Conetto is very poignant. He has an adult daughter, Kendall, whom he named after himself; he hasn\u2019t seen her since she was 3. \u201cI wasn\u2019t ready to get married,\u201d he told me of his early life failings. \u201cI just stayed away.\u201d He thinks the Bahia emerald is garbage. \u201cThat thing is a stinking sack of Siberian seal shit.\u201d <\/a>What an amazing quote. The alliteration!<\/span><\/span>Every time I visited Conetto I left feeling sad. <\/a>Why did you put this impression in?<\/span> I\u2019m always really interested in how things feel. Aren\u2019t we all?<\/span><\/span>
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\nBack in 2000, during the first internet boom, Conetto knew an affable guy named Tony Thomas who\u2019d sunk a lot of money into a startup that now needed a whole lot more money if Thomas ever wanted to get his initial investment back. According to Thomas\u2019 account in court documents, Conetto offered a convoluted plan to help. Thomas and Conetto would fly to Brazil. With these miners Conetto knew, they\u2019d secure $25 million worth of emeralds (meaning emeralds they could sell for $25 million, though Conetto and Thomas would pay much less). They\u2019d use the emeralds as collateral on a loan, the money from which they\u2019d invest with a so-called high-yield fund that guaranteed huge returns through the International Chamber of Commerce. Thus Thomas\u2019 startup would have the money it needed to stay afloat and Thomas would become a very wealthy man.
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\nIn September of 2001, Thomas and Conetto flew to Brazil. In S\u00e3o Paulo, Conetto\u2019s miner friends arranged for them to look at $25 million worth of cut and polished emeralds. That meeting was a disaster\u2014the lapidary shop was dilapidated, and the men who were supposed to finance the transaction failed to show. The miners then tried to make up for it by taking Thomas and Conetto to one of their homes to see a real treasure: the 752-pound emerald in the carport. According to Conetto, a white cat was peeing on the huge stone when they arrived, but still Thomas fell in love. He looked \u201clike he\u2019d found the treasure of Ali Baba,\u201d one of the miners later recalled in court. Thomas, of course, wanted the stone. The miners, records say, set the price at $60,000.
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\nNearly everybody involved has a different version of what happened next. <\/a>How did you approach writing a sequence of events in which the people involved have different versions of the truth?<\/span>This is a nightmare. I approached it by beating my head against my computer for six months.<\/span><\/span>Thomas said he flew home and wired the money to S\u00e3o Paulo. Then he set out to determine the emerald\u2019s true value. He reached out to former business associates and received amazing news. The most comparable stone was at the British Museum: a slightly smaller emerald worth $792 million. According to testimony, Thomas passed this information to an appraiser he met in Brazil. On November 5, 2001, the appraiser\u2014supposedly having seen the Bahia\u2014wrote: \u201cSuch a rare specimen has never been seen, not even at an international auction house such as Sotheby\u2019s\u2026 The stone in this report I estimate is worth $925 million.\u201d
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\nA shocking amount of bullshit happens with big, rare stones. <\/a>This is such a straight-talk way of putting it. Does this come naturally to you, or have you worked over time to cut away the frills and get to plain language?<\/span> I\u2019m not even sure! But like I said earlier, I think part of my job in the story was helping the reader make sense of all the chaos. I had to be the opposite of an unreliable narrator.<\/span><\/span>The Gem of Tanzania, a 10,000-carat ruby, was once valued at 11 million British pounds, but that appraisal turned out to be a forgery. The Life and Pride of America, a 1,905-carat sapphire purchased for $10, for a while was valued at $2.28 million. Then a curator at the National Gem and Mineral Collection at the Smithsonian Institution examined the rock, declared the color \u201cawful\u2014it\u2019s just kind of muddy gray,\u201d and now that sapphire is a paperweight. Recently, in January 2016, newspapers reported the discovery of the world\u2019s largest blue-star sapphire, the Star of Adam, in Sri Lanka. Its anonymous owner told the BBC that the stone is worth $175 million. We shall see.
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\nDuring the time the Bahia emerald was bouncing around, out of the mine but not yet in the sheriff\u2019s safe, an emerald billed as the world\u2019s largest was floating about too. This one was named Teodora. It weighed about 25 pounds and was said to be worth $1.15 million. A Canadian gem merchant named Regan Reaney put it up for auction in January 2012\u2014then he was arrested on (possibly unrelated) fraud charges. Teodora, sadly, included a bunch of white beryl, dyed forest green.
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\nAs for the Bahia emerald, as Thomas told the court, in November 2001, Conetto told him he\u2019d ship the stone home to Thomas in the US. He waited and waited, but the emerald never arrived. So a few months later he asked Conetto to return to Brazil and investigate what happened, only to learn the very worst: The emerald had been stolen en route to California. Sorry, inside job among the exporters,<\/em> Conetto said. What can you do?<\/em>
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\nConetto has a different story. He claims that Thomas never purchased the stone and that he, Conetto, never promised to mail it home for Thomas. Whatever the case, for the next four years Conetto and his miner friends leveraged the emerald\u2019s appraised value, hatching plans to take out loans against its insurance policy. They did rope in one sucker, but still the miners bickered constantly. So, in 2005, Conetto shipped the emerald, for real this time, to San Jose, California. On the packing slip he wrote \u201cROCHA: ROCHEDO\u2013ROCK\u201d and listed the value at $100.
\n
\nAt the Dunkin’ Donuts in Tampa, Ferrara invited me to go with him on what he described as that day\u2019s job. As far as I know, he isn\u2019t a licensed PI, but the job was a stakeout. First we needed to secure what Ferrara called \u201ca low-profile vehicle,\u201d so from the Dunkin\u2019 Donuts we stopped by a U-Haul store, where Ferrara rented a white pickup with an extended cab and excellent air-conditioning. In it, Ferrara, Chrystal, and I then drove to see the client who commissioned the stakeout, a 53-year-old woman who lived in one of Tampa\u2019s endless and endlessly depressing gated communities, each with their own empty roads and swampy lagoons. \u201cIt\u2019s almost unbelievable. She lost millions to her husband,\u201d Ferrara told me as we pulled up to the woman\u2019s house. \u201cShe\u2019s still got some Kinkade paintings inside.\u201d Ferrara\u2019s job on this case, he said, was \u201cto locate and uncover money and assets\u201d and maybe scare the husband straight. \u201cI do it for the adrenaline,\u201d he said. \u201cThere are a lot of sides of me. In a lot of ways I have a very calm Disneyland mentality. Then there\u2019s a side of me that\u2019s very Mafia, wicked mean, cold.\u201d
\n
\nFrom there we headed to the stakeout proper, which consisted of sitting in the U-Haul outside a parking structure near Port Tampa Bay. \u201cThat\u2019s part of stakeouts,\u201d Ferrara said, several minutes into our boredom. \u201cSometimes you\u2019ve got to wait it out.\u201d Finally he left the relative nirvana of the air-conditioned truck to try to figure out if the woman\u2019s husband had purchased an expensive car. He walked into the garage and texted Chrystal, \u201cI\u2019m in.\u201d (The garage was open to the public.) <\/a>That’s funny. What are some of your tips for injecting humor into a piece?<\/span> Be open to the funny while you\u2019re reporting. Look for it. And look for ways to love your subjects, too.<\/span><\/span> In the cab, Chrystal opened her laptop and showed me Ferrara\u2019s website, for a company called Global Quest. It featured pictures of pre-Columbian masks and ancient gold jewelry. \u201cMost of the artifacts come from high individuals. These people don\u2019t want to be known,\u201d Chrystal said. Ferrara discovered these items, or maybe he was just brokering these items\u2014it wasn\u2019t entirely clear. <\/a>When you’re unsure of the facts, when are you OK with leaving that ambiguity in, and when do you need to get to the bottom of it?<\/span> This story was so much about the ways people fudge things for themselves and others. It seems fine to be unsure of the facts when the story is about the impossibility of getting a stable set of facts. If the story is about the facts themselves, then of course you need to get to the bottom of it. There was no bottom here.<\/span><\/span> He returned to the U-Haul with pictures of cars and we left. That night, over dinner, he told me that for a while he had a guitar owned by Elvis. He also once had opportunity to sell a Leonardo da Vinci painting. But no art historians would authenticate the work because it was on canvas and da Vinci didn\u2019t paint on canvas. (Ferrara found this position pinched and ridiculous, arguing, \u201cThere were sails then, right?\u201d)
\n
\nIt was all so disorienting\u2014the stakeout, the da Vinci painting, the Bahia emerald most of all. Because unlike the pre-Columbian masks and the painting, I knew the 752-pound gemstone really did exist. How it got to a Los Angeles Sheriff\u2019s Department vault is complicated, but as best as I could piece together from court documents (and also the obsessive research of a fellow journalist), what happened was this: <\/a>Who was the fellow journalist, and how did you come to work with him or her?<\/span> Brendan Borrell! He\u2019s credited on the piece for his reporting. He spent a VERY long time collecting primary sources and doing interviews. I reached out to him when I was having trouble getting some phone numbers and asked him if he wanted to work together.<\/span><\/span>After Conetto imported the stone to San Jose, he made a deal with Larry Biegler, the man with the squeaky voice. Biegler presented himself as polished and rich. Like Thomas, he fell instantly in love with the emerald, certain that he could sell it to a wealthy sucker. So Biegler made a deal with Conetto. Conetto would sign over to Biegler the rights to sell the emerald. If Biegler sold the stone, they would split the proceeds 50-50.
\n
\nThis was one of the great many moments that tripped me up while reporting this story. Who says to a random business associate, \u201cHey, you want 50 percent of my $925 million emerald?\u201d But Brazeal, the emerald expert, set me straight: There just aren\u2019t that many buyers for a giant gemstone. Fifty percent of $925 million is $462.5 million, whereas 100 percent of zero is nothing. <\/a>Why was it important to be transparent about your reporting process here?<\/span>All of this was in service of the story really being about these characters and what it was like to walk into their strange reality. They all lie to each other all the time\u2014it’s hard to know what to believe. So it was a great relief to me when I finally got a sane person, an academic, on the phone and he explained things to me in terms that I could understand.<\/span><\/span> Thus, after Biegler took possession of the emerald, he made a similar move. He told a gem merchant in New York that he, the gem merchant, could have 10 percent of the sale price if he could sell the rock for more than $25 million. That merchant posted the emerald on eBay (yes). The minimum bid was $19 million and the \u201cbuy now\u201d price was $75 million. The listing drew one offer\u2014for $19 million\u2014but Biegler refused to let the gem dealer sell. He claimed to have a $75 million deal in the works.
\n
\nAmong the most amazing qualities of the Bahia emerald is that its charms seem to work every time. One person falls out of its thrall and the next floats right in. In 2007, the person who floated in was my Florida host, Jerry Ferrara. As he tells it, Biegler approached Ferrara and told him that he, Ferrara, seemed like just the guy to sell the stone. At the time Ferrara was desperate and quasi-homeless, and this was exactly what he wanted to hear. \u201cIt was just incredible,\u201d Ferrara says. \u201cBiegler showed up with a manila envelope and signed ownership of the world\u2019s largest emerald over to me. He said he was looking for somebody like me.\u201d <\/a>What did you make of this? Did you feel like you understood it differently than Ferrara did?<\/span> This is so poignant and sad! Jerry was in this really vulnerable moment, really down, and somebody said they were looking for someone like him. I really felt for Jerry, and it also is straight out of the conman playbook.<\/span><\/span>
\n
\nSoon Ferrara was tangled up in yet another Biegler operation, trying to sell diamonds to a Mormon guy from Idaho named Kit Morrison. Ferrara describes Morrison as \u201caloof, very secretive. Likable\u2014no. He wore handmade Italian suits, handmade Italian leather shoes.\u201d Morrison sent Ferrara $1.3 million, supposedly for diamonds, which he\u2019d receive in the future. In return, Ferrara says, he put the Bahia emerald up as collateral. Then that deal fell through\u2014Ferrara did not have any diamonds. So the emerald went to Morrison.
\n
\nThis should have made them enemies but now they had a common interest: turning the giant rock into money. Thus they became partners, if not friends. \u201cIt\u2019s like we had a wagon full of gold,\u201d Ferrara explained. \u201cWe\u2019re both sleeping by the campfire, one eye open, one hand on your gun under the pillow.\u201d At this point the emerald was in a storage unit, the Commonwealth International depository, in South El Monte, California. Ferrara and Biegler were supposedly the only ones with access to it (although in court, Ferrara and Morrison said Morrison also had access). Ferrara told me that only people who could prove they had the means to buy the emerald could go view it. Sheikhs came to look. Conetto insists that even Bernie Madoff flew out in \u201chis little putt-putt\u201d and planned to buy the emerald for \u201c$91 million in diamonds, $21 million in cash, and three watches worth $15 million.\u201d <\/a>Did you or the magazine try to fact check this?<\/span> We kept this as Conetto\u2019s version of the story. It\u2019s the reality he lives in, which is pretty different from objective reality.<\/span><\/span> But sadly, Madoff was arrested two days before that alleged deal could close.
\n
\nIn June of 2008, Biegler disappeared. He had staged his own supposed kidnapping by a Brazilian warlord, sending word to Ferrara that he needed a ransom paid for his release. This sent Ferrara\u2019s mind spinning back to all the times over the past year Biegler had asked Ferrara to send him money, requests Ferrara obliged because he did not want to blow his chance to make millions in an emerald sale. Eventually, Ferrara pieced together the truth: He learned that Biegler was not nearly as polished and rich as he pretended to be. In fact, he was really the proprietor of a business called B & B Plumbing in Citrus Heights, California. \u201cI got taken by a damn plumber! Can you believe that?\u201d Ferrara told me. B & B Plumbing even had lousy Yelp reviews. (\u201cHired Larry to install a dishwasher. He took my $125 and left \u2026\u201d \u201cNO SHOW!!\u201d One star.)
\n
\nFurious and betrayed, Ferrara says he managed to get the secretary at Commonwealth International to let him and Morrison remove the emerald from the vault without Biegler present. They loaded the stone into a Cadillac Escalade SUV and headed east, toward Vegas. Biegler, Ferrara says, arrived at Commonwealth International less than 24 hours later to find the emerald gone.
\n
\nThe day after I went on the stakeout with Ferrara, we drove the U-Haul pickup to his friend Kris Rotonda\u2019s home. <\/a>Did you set up your activities with Ferrara before the visit, or did you just show up and tag along?<\/span> I just told him I wanted to tag along on his life. We didn\u2019t have any real plan. While I was waiting for my connecting flight to take off to get to Florida he texted to say he was going on a stakeout the next day and asked if I wanted to go along. Yes, please! Then, like a lot of people I think, he liked that somebody wanted to listen to him and see his world.<\/span><\/span> Among Ferrara\u2019s current ventures is working with Rotonda to launch My Pet Shopping Network, which, if all goes according to plan, will be a media behemoth like Home Shopping Network but for pet products. We sat in Rotonda\u2019s living room where his three dogs ran in circles and skidded out on his tile floor, and Rotonda\u2019s young daughter kept toddling in, followed by Rotonda\u2019s wife. The scene was warm, totally regular, and unslick, and in it Ferrara seemed to relax for the first time since I arrived. Rotonda cued up their Pet Shopping Network sizzle reel. On it, he makes a pitch for a product called the Pooch Selfie that includes a tennis ball you clip onto a smartphone so your dog will stare at it and you can take a great selfie of you and your best friend looking into the camera.
\n
\n\u201cGreat, right?\u201d Ferrara said, when the reel finished. It wasn\u2019t half bad. Then Ferrara came down to earth for a bit. \u201cMost of the networks are so busy making dead ends that they don\u2019t have time to meet with us.\u201d
\n
\nFerrara\u2019s life story is filled with pain. He told me his mother walked out when he was 4 and he didn\u2019t 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 \u20134 degrees, she drove by but didn\u2019t pick him up. In 2004 his sister asked to borrow money. Ferrara told me that he gave her a few thousand dollars. Then she died of an overdose. Among the more fantastical family tales he told me was that he had an uncle who owned a junkyard in Edison, New Jersey, and when developers bought the land and cleaned it up, they found 79 skeletons buried in the soil. <\/a>Did you or the magazine try to verify these things, or did you take his word for it?<\/span> This was left in the \u201cfantastical family tales\u201d language as well. But there really is a Ferrara gangster family. Vincent \u201cthe Animal\u201d Ferrara.<\/span><\/span>
\n
\n\u201cLet\u2019s just say I like my soda flat and my cereal soggy,\u201d Ferrara said. So good. With such colorful characters, did you feel like you almost had too much good material? I was so grateful that Jerry finally agreed to let me come visit and that he was such a fantastic character. I kind of love him. This seems to sum up his outlook on life.
\n
\nI asked if he liked pets and he said, \u201cNo! I hate them all! What an asshole!\u201d (He later said he was kidding.)
\n
\nHe doesn\u2019t drink because, he said, \u201cI\u2019m in the limelight,\u201d and alcohol makes him even more of a jerk.
\n
\n\u201cI hate sports too!\u201d
\n
\nFerrara\u2019s lone outlets are smoking Marlboro Blacks and watching SpongeBob SquarePants<\/em>. <\/a>How did you get this out of him?<\/span> I asked a really boring question\u2014\u201cWhat do you do to relax?\u201d\u2014and this all just came out. The trick, if there is one, is finding a way to feel genuine affection for your subjects so they feel safe telling you this stuff.<\/span><\/span> \u201cSpongeBob has a personality that cares about everybody, he sees the positive in everybody. He tries to make people laugh,\u201d Ferrara explained. His favorite episode is \u201cBand Geeks,\u201d in which Squidward is set up to fail, yet again. He lies and promises that his nonexistent band will play a huge gig at the Bubble Bowl, the Super Bowl in Bikini Bottom. He scrambles to pull together a band but, Ferrara said, \u201cnobody he knows has talent.\u201d He\u2019s going to humiliate himself. \u201cThe show starts. Squidward\u2019s sweating,\u201d Ferrara said. \u201cBut then it rocks.\u201d Behind the scenes, SpongeBob steps in and saves him, turning Squidward\u2019s friends into great musicians. Squidward succeeds beyond his wildest dreams.
\n
\n\u201cPeople in my family think it\u2019s creepy,\u201d Ferrara said, wrapping up his exegesis, \u201cbut my life is extremely hard, anxiety-ridden. SpongeBob gives me relief. Don\u2019t put a horror flick in front of me, don\u2019t put a Mafia movie in front of me. That\u2019s my life.\u201d
\n
\nAfter Larry Biegler realized the emerald was gone from the Commonwealth International storage unit, he called the Temple City police and told the officer on duty that his emerald had been stolen and that he\u2019d been abducted and released by the Brazilian Mafia. This triggered the arrival of Los Angeles County Sheriff\u2019s Department detectives Miller and Gayman. Soon, Ferrara and Morrison became suspects. The detectives took a few weeks to track them down, but by December 15, 2008, Miller and Gayman were in Eagle, Idaho, in the Boise foothills, staking out Morrison\u2019s house. They set a perimeter and shivered in their rental car for two days.
\n
\nOn the third day they knocked on Morrison\u2019s door. His wife answered and said Morrison wasn\u2019t 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\u2019s wife got Morrison on the phone and he cut a deal with Miller and Gayman. He would meet the detectives in Las Vegas, where he and Ferrara had stored the emerald, and they\u2019d turn the stone over to the Sheriff\u2019s Department on the condition that neither Ferrara nor Morrison would be arrested. So Miller and Gayman flew home to Burbank and assembled a small army, including a dozen officers with assault rifles, and caravanned overnight out I-15 East. When they arrived at the depository at 7 am, the Las Vegas Metro Police Department was already onsite with a SWAT team and helicopter cover. Morrison showed up in a sport coat and slacks, and within the hour Miller and Gayman were wheeling a piano dolly topped with a gargantuan emerald into the desert sun. Everybody took a lot of selfies. Then the detectives loaded the Bahia emerald into a police van, drove it back over the San Gabriel Mountains, and logged it into evidence.
\n
\nAs promised, the Los Angeles Sheriff\u2019s Department threw the question of who owned the Bahia emerald over to the Los Angeles Superior Court. From 2007 to 2015, people began endless legal battles: Conetto sued Morrison, Thomas went after Conetto, the New York gem dealer sued Biegler. Ferrara spent a lot of days in settlement hearings and a lot of nights sleeping in hidden corners of hotel lobbies so he didn\u2019t have to pay for rooms. Only once did he lunge across the conference table and threaten to beat the shit out of somebody. <\/a>Did you ask, or did he volunteer that detail?<\/span> I asked, but he was happy to tell.<\/span><\/span>
\n
\nDuring the legal proceedings, Biegler disappeared. Conetto got distracted by a friend\u2019s new business that turned manure into electricity. The detectives came to believe that the emerald belonged to Thomas. After all, courts found he was the only litigant who\u2019d ever paid anything for the stone. But Thomas fared poorly at his trial. Several key facts were not on his side. One, he never called FedEx to see what happened to his $925 million package. Two, he claimed his house burned down in 2006 and incinerated his bill of sale. (The court found his claim awfully convenient.) It also turned out, though this was not revealed at trial, that there was no large emerald at the British Museum in London at all. The entire backstory of the $792 million comp was made up.
\n
\nThe court had great difficulty pinning down who owned the emerald or how much it was worth\u2014or, 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\u2014an object that everyone\u2019s chasing but that doesn\u2019t really matter.
\n
\nStill, in 2011, the judge rejected Thomas\u2019 claim of ownership. Then the judge got a new job, and Thomas asked for a mistrial\u2014which the courts granted. In 2013, a second judge heard all this insanity again. But by that point Ferrara, Morrison, and another guy had gathered into a sort of consortium, under the name FM Holdings. That way someone, any one of them, could reclaim possession of the emerald, sell it, and divide the proceeds. <\/a>You seem to have condensed a lot. How did you decide which of the legal proceedings to summarize and which to spell out in detail? Was the story originally much longer?<\/span> The condensing was the hardest part and took lots of editorial help. Thank you, Maria!<\/span><\/span>
\n
\nThe LA Superior Court awarded the Bahia emerald to FM Holdings on June 23, 2015.
\n
\nBut perhaps the emerald really is cursed. Before the Sheriff\u2019s Department received the order to release the emerald to FM Holdings, the District Court of DC granted an injunction filed by the Department of Justice on behalf of the country of Brazil. Brazil claimed that the Bahia emerald had been illegally exported and really belonged to them.
\n
\n\u201cI\u2019ll be honest,\u201d says John Nadolenco, the primary lawyer on the case for Brazil. \u201cWhen I first got the letter\u201d\u2014from Brazil, asking for help repatriating the Bahia emerald\u2014\u201cI thought it was a total hoax. I thought it was one of those Nigerian prince things where they\u2019re going to want us to send a couple million dollars to some bank account and they\u2019re going to take all of our money.\u201d But Nadolenco\u2019s partner asked him to pursue the client. Nadolenco wrote back to the Brazilians with a real proposal, though he couldn\u2019t resist including the jokey promise that his friend Indiana Jones could help reclaim the emerald if his own efforts failed. He got the gig.
\n
\nSo today the Los Angeles County Sheriff\u2019s Department is still\u2014still\u2014holding the emerald, now as evidence for a criminal case they\u2019re building. <\/a>Why did you choose not to go into that case in detail?<\/span>There was just much too much plot in this story. Everything that could come out had to come out.<\/span><\/span> The limbo is uncomfortable for Ferrara. He\u2019s a big man with big, tenacious, preposterous dreams stuck in a life that feels too banal, empty, and small. My last day in Florida we met up at Cracker Barrel. Ferrara likes the tchotchkes there. During a lull in the conversation, Chrystal told me she worries what will happen if Ferrara loses the emerald for good. \u201cIt would devastate him,\u201d she whispered. \u201cIt\u2019s his whole life.\u201d
\n
\nFerrara and I talked for hours and hours and hours, from the retiree breakfast rush past lunch, through every last detail of the saga. At one point, he placed the salt and pepper shakers in the middle of the table. He slid them a few inches apart and set his phone on top, like the flat roof of a house. \u201cThis is our foundation in life\u2014your mother, your father, friends, teachers, the people that mean something to you.\u201d (He meant the shakers to represent the people and the phone to be your life.)
\n
\nHe slid the shakers out from under the phone. \u201cAs these people fail you, these go away, one by one.\u201d The phone, your life, falls.
\n
\nBefore I headed to the airport, we returned the truck to U-Haul and revisited Dunkin\u2019 Donuts for some more iced coffees. We sat outside, in the horrible humid air, so Ferrara could smoke his Marlboros. He mentioned that, along with SpongeBob, he connected with Lemony Snicket\u2019s A Series of Unfortunate Events<\/em>, or at least the title. \u201cLike I wrote one time, \u2018We entered a world that was inhabited by dark shadows, the nights would never end, the mornings would never come,\u2019\u201d he said. He didn\u2019t quite get the quote from his own prose correct. But he made his point: Life is tough. People betray you and die. We all need escapes.
\n
\nI drove to the airport. I boarded my flight. Even before my plane touched down, Ferrara had left me a voicemail. \u201cCall me!\u201d he bellowed, optimistic as ever. \u201cYou will never guess what transpired today. As you left, the winds of change blew in.\u201d
\n
\nI called him back the next morning. He told me a story about the emerald, which I understood less the longer he talked. He also mentioned that he\u2019d been approached about hosting a TV show, a reality treasure-hunter series. He would be the star. It was nice to hear his voice. <\/a>Tell me about what you were trying to get across with this ending.<\/span>That I really liked Jerry\u2019s crazy self and that I accepted him for who he is. He\u2019s a beautiful deluded dreamer. My working title on this story was \u201cSome Dreamers of a Certain Dream.\u201d Like a lot of writers (and especially female writers of a certain age who live in California), I have a Didion problem.<\/span><\/span>
\n
\n<\/a>Thank you for caring about this piece! It caused so much heartache for so long. Xoxo<\/span><\/span>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Elizabeth Weil, a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine and Outside, says she doesn’t write about \u201csuper important\u201d things. But her warm and captivating voice has animated every subject she’s chosen to tackle over her 22-year career writing for magazines. An inveterate generalist, she says her stories have tended to follow her own […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":7069,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"topics":[],"authors":[9],"issue":[],"class_list":["post-1661","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-annotation-tuesday","authors-katia-savchuk"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nAnnotation Tuesday: Elizabeth Weil and \u201cThe Curse of the Bahia Emerald\u201d - Nieman Storyboard<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/niemanstoryboard.org\/2018\/01\/09\/annotation-tuesday-elizabeth-weil-and-the-curse-of-the-bahia-emerald\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Annotation Tuesday: Elizabeth Weil and \u201cThe Curse of the Bahia Emerald\u201d - Nieman Storyboard\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Elizabeth Weil, a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine and Outside, says she doesn’t write about \u201csuper important\u201d things. 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