Books uncover the dark underbelly of the diamond world

Before Canadian juniors burst on to the scene a decade ago, the world of diamonds was cloaked in secrecy. The distribution chain — from mining to sales — was controlled by De Beers Consolidated Mines, a powerful cartel that kept diamond prices stable by manipulating supply. Most people understood that De Beers was a South African empire with an extraordinary flair for marketing, but not much more. They knew even less about diamonds — such as where to look for them — and De Beers aimed to keep it that way.

But everything changed in 1991, when Canadian junior Dia Met Minerals discovered diamonds at Lac de Gras in the Northwest Territories. Independent experts clambered out of obscurity, loose-lipped fellow juniors eager to participate in the $50-billion-per-year trade squeezed what leads they could from academic journals, and rents started to appear in De Beers’ veil of secrecy. This unprecedented disclosure, combined with original research, forms the basis of Matthew Hart’s Diamond: A Journey to the Heart of an Obsession, a fascinating account of the world’s most coveted gemstone.

Those seeking a detailed historical record of the diamond business will be disappointed, for Hart’s 276-page book is more of a collection of tales — sometimes disjointed — of how an intrinsically useless mineral came to change the fortunes of entire countries, feed civil wars and turn honest men into criminals. As Hart concludes in the last chapter, “the appetite for diamonds is a powerful hunger, and it transforms the places where it is awakened.”

Hart, former mining editor of the Rapaport Diamond Report, is at his best when recounting observations from his own journeys or recreating dramas such as Eira Thomas’s tenacious race against melting ice in the Barrens. He takes us around the world, from the frigid Arctic to the sweltering polishing factories in Bombay, from the staid offices of De Beers’ headquarters in Johannesburg to the diamond-laden rivers of Brazil. Along the way, he introduces us to the characters behind the scenes.

Take Simon Teakle, for instance, an inexperienced scout in Christie’s jewelry department who goes out on a routine housecall and comes back with a blue diamond pendant that sells for C$3 million. Or Gabi Tolkowsky, an Antwerp diamond cutter, who spends two and a half years cloistered in an underground bunker fashioning his masterpiece, the “Centenary” diamond, from a finicky 600-carat stone pulled from the Premier mine in South Africa. Or veteran diamond explorer Chris Jennings, who, like some displaced commando, conducts a solo midnight raid on De Beers’ Jwaneng mine in Botswana in order to collect samples that can unlock the secrets of Jwaneng’s mineral chemistry and point the way to other potential deposits in the area.

There is also an alarming chapter on the many ways to steal a diamond on its journey from the mine to the jewelry store. “As the axiom goes, if they (employees) can see it and touch it, they will try to steal it,” says Hart. One of the more inventive schemes used homing pigeons to ferry diamonds out of the heavily guarded beach mines along the Namibian coast. The miners would smuggle the birds out to the beach in their lunchboxes. There, they would load rough diamonds into harnesses attached to the birds and set the pigeons free. The birds would fly over the security fence and head for “home,” where accomplices would greet them and their booty. When the scheme was discovered and the pigeons banned, the miners began firing arrows filled with rough across the fence instead.

But Hart seems distracted when delving into relevant historical facts, such as the struggles between Barney Barnato and Cecil Rhodes, the 19th-century entrepreneurs who controlled the early South African mines that eventually formed the De Beers empire. Likewise, a description of European forays into the Barrens during the 18th century peters out before it ever gathers steam, leaving the reader puzzled as to how the account fits with the rest of the story. Toward the end of the book, typos begin to appear frequently, as if the copyeditor was rushing to complete the job for deadline.

These oversights are unfortunate, because they diminish an otherwise entertaining account of the complex and sinister world of diamonds. Anyone with an interest in diamonds and an appreciation of storytelling peppered with fascinating anecdotes should read it.