Blood Diamonds (7 page)

For most of its postslavery history, there was nothing remarkable about Sierra Leone, and Freetown likely lived up to its name. For the most part, those living there got along well with their neighbors and their British overseers. It wasn't until diamonds were discovered in the 1930s that Sierra Leone's course toward self-destruction was set.

 

TODAY,IT'S HARD TO DECIDE if Freetown looks more or less depressing from the air. Flying in from the provinces on one of the choppers that regularly blows sand into the drinks of those trying to relax on the beach, you can look out the port windows to watch the Peninsula Mountains drop away to reveal its jumbled collection of teetering high-rise buildings that seem to be lined up behind one another like a suicide procession, as if waiting their turn to leap to their deaths in Destruction Bay. The bay itself, aptly named, is haunted with the hulls of half-sunken vessels. The city claws its way up the mountains, creeping into the jungle like a disease. At street level the city is a chaos of mud, wrecked cars, zinc roofs, and palm trees, all tied together with all-weather plastic sheeting. It's not surprising that the capital is so decimated and hopeless considering that Sierra Leone effectively ceased functioning during the civil war. The RUF's diamond war has so far killed about 75,000 people and mutilated another 20,000.
²
Eighty percent of its estimated five million citizens have been turned into refugees and most of them seem to have retreated to Freetown. Like everywhere else in the country, Freetown is just another city where people struggle to survive from day to day. The only difference is that
their efforts are overshadowed more by high-rise office buildings than palm trees and climbing vines.

Architecturally, the capital is a disorganized landslide of cardboard shacks, cinderblock houses, poured concrete office buildings, and zinc-and-timber Krio formations that look like miniature Southern plantations, minus the beauty, craftsmanship, and inspiration. Downtown is a maelstrom of blaring horns, fish-smoke, money changers, fistfights, immobilized traffic, and 100-degree heat.

Freetown is truly something to behold, a writhing hive of killers, villains, and wretched victims. Refugees and RUF fighters—both former and current—wander the same roadsides. UN officials have beers with con men trying to sell diamonds. Kamajor fighters have taken over a downtown hotel for reasons no one seems sure of, while disarmed RUF fighters stage demonstrations downtown over perceived injustices of the peace agreement. A bar in Aberdeen—Freetown's beach district—is the vortex for this contradictory reality: Every type of human flotsam and do-gooder can be found rubbing elbows at Paddy's on any weekend night. The place is actually a huge bamboo and palm leaf tent, featuring two bars, a TV, and a stage. The parking lot is the domain of beggars and robbers, as former RUF fighters and their amputated victims jostle for the attention of the paying crowd, itself a mix of diamond smugglers, mercenaries, UN personnel, prostitutes, businessmen, journalists, workers from some 120 nongovernmental organizations with headquarters in Freetown, and other assorted riffraff. The strange population of Freetown results in some equally strange encounters.

Among the most disconcerting, especially for those unfamiliar with daily life in Freetown, are those with diamond smugglers,
men whose thoughts are not about the ever-present tragedy of Sierra Leone's diamond war visible on every street corner, but only about the profits to be made selling illicit stones. They are as ruthless and barbaric as any drug dealer in South America, a point that was driven home one day by a phone call I got from a Senegalese man named Kahn who had been trying for weeks to sell us diamonds. He was in the car, he said, en route to our room at the Solar Hotel near the beach, and in the passenger seat was an overweight RUF officer I'd met briefly in a downtown café.

“He's got a lot of good, good diamonds,” said Kahn, who handed the phone to the man before I could protest.

“Listen, I'm sorry for the mix-up,” I began, “but I've told Kahn over and over that we're not interested in buying any diamonds.”

The RUF man began to squeal. He told me I was a dead man for backing out on a deal that was never made. “RUF gon'
fuck
you up!” he screeched before the line went dead.

This was not the first run-in Hondros and I had with RUF smugglers in Freetown, but we were determined to do our best to make it our last. As soon as word had gotten out that two white men purporting to be journalists were interested in looking at some rebel goods, our room at the Solar had become something of a magnet for anyone trying to sell anything. We had visitors at all hours of the day and night: If not diamond traffickers, then certainly drug-dealers and prostitutes. The most avid salesmen were a hulking bodybuilder of a man who carried with him a backpack of wares—everything from thick bags of marijuana to carved wooden gimcracks—and Kahn, a skinny, crooked-standing man with a wandering eye.

A few weeks before, Kahn had picked up me and
New York Times
photographer Tyler Hicks on the side of the road as we were waiting
for a cab downtown. One of us made the mistake of thinking out loud that it might be worth the investment to buy a known conflict diamond or two and test how easily we could smuggle it out of the country and try to sell it, with full disclosure of its sources, in New York. No sooner was the thought verbalized than Kahn produced a hand-printed list of the RUF diamonds he had for sale. We made it clear—or so we thought—that we really didn't want to buy anything, especially from a cabbie we'd met only four minutes earlier, but that it might be nice to have some photos of rough goods for the archives. Kahn agreed to bring one of his sellers to meet us later at the Solar.

It was the beginning of the end, in terms of the peace and tranquility of our hideout. Whatever it lacked in ambiance—rooms at the Solar are painted swimming-pool blue and all seem to have sustained massive water damage if the stains on the walls and ceilings were any indication—it more than made up for in personality. The desk manager is descended from former Connecticut slaves and likes Americans, allowing free access to the Internet on the hotel's one functional telephone and looking the other way when we ran up several days' worth of beer tabs at the bar. The bar itself is nothing less than an oasis; hidden in the trees, it's far from the main road and therefore less susceptible to invasion by the tightly wrapped and beglittered hookers who, anywhere else in Aberdeen, will literally assault you for your attention.

The first conflict-gem salesman Kahn ferreted to Room E-2 was a Kamajor, a Mende fighter who relied as much on superstition for protection in battle as shotguns and rocket-propelled grenades. Charmed amulets, ancient tribal prayers, and animist rituals were meant to make Kamajors invisible to enemies, impenetrable to bullets and fragmentation grenades, and unconquerable in battle. To have one of these men standing in your hotel room is unnerving,
especially one with thousands of dollars in rough stones stolen from an overtaken RUF mine coming out of his burlap pocket, along with a professional jeweler's loupe.

More unnerving still is the moment when you tell him that you're not interested in buying the stones, just looking at them for journalistic reasons. The smile turns into a blank stare, not understanding because we didn't even make an offer. Then he turns to Kahn, who's smiling at the wall, perhaps thinking that we're being shrewd in our negotiations. Deciding that must be the case, he hustles the baffled Kamajor out of the room with promises to return.

And return he does, time and again, dragging with him one bush fighter after another, whether Kamajor or their RUF enemies. Not one of them believed that we were journalists. Even if they did, they certainly didn't believe that we weren't in the market for goods. It seemed everyone else was, and as far as they were concerned there was no reason we shouldn't have been, too. It got to the point where we dreaded hearing a knock at the door, sure that we'd open it to find Kahn presenting us with a malarial RUF captain clutching a leather bag filled with diamonds, or a Sierra Leone Army soldier eager for the chance to sell diamonds he'd stolen from the RUF during a raid two years ago.

Things climaxed when Kahn called my mobile phone that day, telling me of the RUF colonel sitting in his passenger seat who had millions in diamonds that he wanted to unload quickly. The man was nervous about being in a city filled with his victims, refugees, and amputees who had fled RUF guns and blades from the provinces to hide in camps like the one operated by Médecins Sans Frontières in Freetown.

After the call, we too were on the run and, as a matter of fact, wound up across the street from the MSF camp, at a vagrants' flophouse called the Cockle Bay Guest House and Relaxation Center.
There were no locking fences, guards, or any other filter on the local color, which it featured in abundance. The 10-by-12-foot reception area was dominated by an early 1980s–style boom box, the type that's the size of a footlocker, thundering some sort of religious rap music. Despite the din, four or five people snoozed on the furniture and the woman at the desk eyed us like we would be seeing her later, after she'd knocked on the door wondering if we were interested in a “massage.” The rooms were only $7 a night, but that was probably because the locks could be breached simply by leaning on the door.

Outside the main entrance, the city's urban wildlife came right up to the curb.

 

AGAINST SUCH A BACKDROP, diamond smugglers must feel right at home. Indeed, one of the people I met who was most at peace with himself was an Australian who would have seemed no more at home if we'd met in Sydney.

Jacob Singer is a friendly 50-ish man with a bushy salt-and-pepper mustache and tough, bright little eyes set in a relief-map face of creases and wrinkles. He's a popular figure in Freetown, it's soon apparent, greeted from all street corners and by most passersby at the Solar's open-walled outdoor bar. He returns all waves with a hearty greeting that mixes the indigenous Krio language with his own Australian idioms:

“Ha de body?”

“No bad.”

“Well, goodonya then.”

Less cheerful and popular, mostly due to his lack of English skills, is Valdy, his Polish companion. Muscular and handsome, Valdy's bald white head is a beacon among Freetown's African citizenry.
Except for the fact that they live at the Solar Hotel for months on end, it would be easy to mistake the two for UNAMSIL workers or bosses of a relief group. Both dress smartly and comfortably in shorts and polo shirts and wheel around town in a hired green Mercedes.

In fact, the two men are Mutt-and-Jeff diamond smugglers: Singer has the connections and does the talking; Valdy is the money man. In September 2001, they were struggling to string together a deal for $500,000 worth of rebel diamonds from Kono.

Diamonds are among the easiest—and by far the most valuable by weight—commodities to smuggle. Three hundred grams of diamonds are equal in value to 40,000 pounds of iron ore, but only one of those commodities can be successfully smuggled in one's bowels. Millions of dollars worth of diamonds can be carried almost anywhere in the body or on it and they don't set off airport metal detectors. They can be sold quickly and they are virtually untraceable. This is one of the reasons there is no such thing as “conflict timber”; rebels wishing to smuggle tropical lumber and sell it on the black market have a much harder time transporting and unloading their goods than rebels who deal in diamonds.

The most reliable way for smugglers to get diamonds out of Sierra Leone is to swallow them and hope to time their next bowel movements so that they can be retrieved with some amount of privacy. There is no possible way to detect the stones if they're inside your intestines, but the prospect of recovering them is unappealing and, besides, smuggling out one or two half-carat diamonds is easy enough without having to resort to such digestive measures. They can be carried in your breast pocket or a pack of cigarettes. There is no shortage of incredible tales of intrigue and deception when it
comes to diamond smuggling, probably because the tiny size of the contraband encourages ingenuity. In
The Heart of the Matter,
his novel about love and betrayal set in Sierra Leone, Graham Greene described Lebanese smuggling diamonds in the stomachs of live parrots. Ian Fleming, author of the James Bond series of novels, had his hero smuggle goods in Dunlop golf balls in
Diamonds Are Forever.
Over the years, people have carried thousands of dollars of stones inside the knots of their ties, in tins of fruit salad, in the false heels of specially made shoes. One woman who lost an eye in a car accident took the opportunity to hide diamonds in her empty socket, behind a glass eye.

Though it often seems to be so, smuggling isn't reserved to fringe characters covered in scars found sipping cheap gin in tropical airport lounges. It also occurs among the most elite in the diamond world. One prominent British diamond merchant was caught by Scotland Yard and fined back taxes for having illegally smuggled $2 million worth of polished goods from London to Belgium over a three-year period. He was only caught when police accidentally learned that he'd been robbed of $184,000 worth of goods, but hadn't reported the theft because they were smuggled in the first place. What makes this case notable is the fact that the man had served for 11 years on the customs agency's diamond evaluation committee.

In fact, smuggling within respected channels of the diamond industry is, like all else related to it, a well-organized and long-standing system. The largest cutting and polishing centers in the world, in Bombay and Surat, India, were founded on smuggled goods that made their way from DTC customers in Belgium via German courier, with the finished stones then being smuggled back. Courier “companies” made a handsome living employing
schoolteachers, laborers, airline pilots, and others who were willing to take a free, all-expense-paid vacation to the Orient in return for carrying home a slightly lumpy tube of toothpaste. All of this was done to avoid the local and value-added taxes for the round-trip journey.
³