Dinosaurs in the Attic (40 page)

The judge rejected an insanity defense for Murphy, and he was sentenced to two life terms for the double murder. While in prison, Murphy became a born-again Christian. On December 21, 1984, he was released from prison before a cheering crowd of seventy-five inmates, who held up a sign saying "Goodbye Jack, We'll Miss You." He told reporters, "I'm not the same person that came in here a long time ago."
MURPH SURFACES: "MY TAB IS PAID"
screamed the headlines of the New York
Daily News
the day after his release. Twenty years after Murph pocketed the Star of India in the Museum one night, he was still big news. At the time of this writing, he is working at the Christian Prison Ministries, a halfway house in Orlando, where he is enrolled in a work-release program.

A CAVE OF GEMS

Entering the new Hall of Minerals and Gems is like entering a fabulous cave. The floor and walls are covered with thick brown carpeting. Everything is dark except the specimens themselves, which are set off by brilliant spotlight illumination. It is a far cry from the old Morgan Hall of Murph the Surf's days. One notable difference is that the security system is now as sophisticated as modern technology allows—so sensitive, according to popular rumor, that at night the occasional cockroach used to set off the alarms until they were finally adjusted to be a bit less reactive. Of course, the Museum will not discuss security in the hall except to say that it is virtually impenetrable.

We can see the recovered Star of India and its two legendary companions in the new Morgan Hall of Gems, glowing under a softly focused spotlight, their six-rayed stars seemingly following the viewer's eye. Asterism in sapphires is caused by the needlelike mineral rutile. The rutile inclusions are oriented in three directions parallel to each crystal face of the sapphire. If the stone is cut properly, three rays of white light cross it, producing a six-pointed star.

The histories of many of the Museum's most famous stones are sketchy or unknown. Although we know the Star of India was discovered in Ceylon some three centuries ago, we know nothing about its history until it was given to the Museum. "This isn't an uncommon situation," says Joe Peters, scientific assistant in the Museum's Department of Mineral Sciences. "Most dealers don't want to reveal their sources. Perhaps they just want to avoid competition." Peters guesses the Star of India may have come from an Indian nobleman who sold it anonymously to payoff some debts. The procurer of the Star of India, George Frederick Kunz, merely reports that it "has a historical record of three hundred years." He makes no further mention of how he obtained it or what its history might be.

Peters explains that most valuable minerals and gems are found by miners and smuggled out. "Many of our better specimens," he says, "might have originally been illegally obtained—brought out in some miner's lunch pail, perhaps. While we're not thrilled to acquire stones with no history, so to speak, we do feel it's our duty to preserve them if they are important pieces."

Any museum that acquires minerals and gems must, of necessity, work with dealers, some of whom are keeping their sources secret, and the museum must accept stones without knowing where they carne from. "Right now," Peters says, "we're getting some extraordinary gem-quality crystals from Pakistan. The dealers may be keeping their sources top secret. It may be because they are worried about competition, or it may be that they are getting their crystals from miners."

The Museum's original mineral and gem collection is the result of a happy marriage between the money of J. P. Morgan and the expertise of George Frederick Kunz, Tiffany's first gem expert. Kunz was an early pioneer of gem and mineral collecting, and by 1889 he had assembled a collection of American gems so fabulous that it won a grand prize at the Paris Exposition. In 1890, Morgan bought the entire collection for the Museum. (This collection included the fine series of American diamonds stolen by Murph the Surf and never recovered.) In 1900, Kunz completed the acquisition of a splendid collection of foreign gems for Morgan, which the millionaire also donated to the Museum. These two collections together included—among much else—2,442 natural pearls, a group of 166 splendid sapphires, a dozen rubies, 13 emeralds, 57 beryls, 30 aquamarines, 92 tourmalines, 70 topazes, 24 diamonds, and hundreds of amethysts, gem quartzes, garnets, opals, ancient carved stones, Babylonian cylinder seals, ambers, spodumenes, jades, turquoises, and moonstones.

In 1901, Morgan bought and donated to the Museum the Bement collection of minerals, which even today is considered one of the finest private mineral collections ever assembled. The collection, which reportedly cost $100000—in 1901 dollars!—consisted of 12,000 minerals and 580 meteorites. Several railroad cars were required to haul it to the Museum.

Although much of Kunz' collecting took place among the backrooms of dealers, he often went into the field himself. He had an uncanny ability to locate extraordinary specimens where others had less success. One of his most impressive pieces is the Great Jade Mass from Jordansmuhl, Silesia (now in Poland), which is on display near the center of the hall, with one side cut and polished.

At the time this specimen was discovered by Kunz in 1890, there existed among German scholars a controversy called the
Nephritfrage,
or "nephrite [Jade] question."
^*59
For many years, archeologists had been turning up worked and unworked jades of the nephrite type from the refuse heaps and dwellings of the Swiss "Lake Dwellers," a prehistoric European people. Raw jade had also been found scattered about in various areas, but none
in situ
—that is, actually embedded in native rock. The question was, where did the jade come from? The earliest "theory" for the origin of European jade was that these pieces were frozen thunderbolts. Later, standard scholarly opinion held that the jade had been bartered by nomadic Asiatic tribes, and that there was no indigenous source of jade in Europe. Late in the nineteenth century, however, one heretical scholar, a Dr. Meyer, asserted that the jade
was
indigenous to Europe. The
Nephritfrage
was born, and raged in the pages of obscure journals as only a German academic question could.

In 1890, Kunz was traveling across Germany, assembling a collection of historic jades for the Herber Bishop collection (now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art). Being sympathetic to Meyer's theory, he decided to try his luck at finding a source of the jade
in situ.
Kunz made a side trip to Jordansmuhl, then in Germany, where occasional pieces of loose and unworked jade had been found. With a colleague named Dr. Hintze and two assistants, Kunz took a train to the small village. Once there, he looked up Karl von Kreigsheim, a local landowner on whose land loose pieces of jade had been found. Both Hintze and Kreigsheim thought Kunz was a little mad to expect to find—in one day—an example of
in situ
jade that had eluded fortune seekers and scientists for years. It promised to be a fearsome task—especially since all the rock in that area had a greenish tint that made it almost indistinguishable from raw jade. Kunz wrote later in
The Saturday Evening Post:

    At eleven o'clock, four hours after we began operations, I came across a peculiar protuberance on one side of a ledge of rock—green like the rock, but to me, even at first glance subtly different.... I soon realized that I had come upon a piece of jade of incredible dimensions. When it was finally lifted out of the embedding rock it was found to be by far the largest piece of jade ever discovered
in situ
anywhere in the world.
^*60

The giant slab measured eight feet by five feet by one and a half feet, and it weighed 4,700 pounds—nearly two and a half tons. Indeed, there was more jade in this single piece than in all European jade found up to that time. The
Nephritfrage
was settled in one decisive blow, which, Kunz noted with satisfaction, ruined the career of more than one German scholar. Von Kreigsheim insisted that the jade was Kunz's by right of discovery, and gave him the specimen.

Unpolished jade looks like ordinary rock (which is one reason this piece had previously eluded discovery), and the Museum was able to store the stone safely in its backyard, unprotected, for several years before space could be found in the mineral hall. Later, one side of the slab was polished at Tiffany's—no small feat, considering jade's extreme hardness.

Another of Kunz's great coups was procuring some extraordinary Russian amethysts from under the nose of the Czarevitch Nicholas II, who was rumored to want them himself. Before the turn of the century, Kunz made a mineralogical trip through the Ural Mountains. On this trip he met Dr. Clerc, founder of a Russian museum, who invited him on a trip through the steppes to gather gems.

During his trip, Kunz picked up some extremely valuable stones collected by peasants. The area was noted for its gems, and before the planting of the spring crops the peasants would scour the land, looking for occasional gemstones washed out by the spring rains. "As soon as our arrival in a village," Kunz wrote, "the peasants, having heard I was a collector of gems, would come to me with their hoarded treasures.... Wrapped in dirty bits of rag, stuffed into an old stocking, stowed away in some broken bit of crockery with a lot of worthless odds and ends that their presence in the house might not be suspected, they were brought to me in great secrecy."

In particular, there was one famous old peasant women who possessed a quantity of allegedly "perfect" amethysts found on her property. She had already presented five to the Czarina, and it was rumored that Nicholas II wanted the rest. Kunz wrote:

    At last I approached the vicinity where dwelt the woman reputed to possess the famous amethysts and, meeting a peasant on the road, I inquired where she lived. He grinned broadly.

"Akh, the Czarina, you mean?"

"No, she who sent the amethysts to the Czarina."

He waved his hand, still grinning. "Yes, it is the Czarina you want—the Czarina Ujakova. She it is who sent the amethysts to the great Czarina." Then he came closer and with a shrewd wink observed, "You see, she is not stupid, that Ujakova. Her amethysts were fit for an empress, and so she sent them to the Empress of all the Russias. But we know her—that Ujakova. Did she expect nothing in return for those great amethysts, big as bantam's eggs, and purple as the hills at sunset?" He leaned impressively nearer. "She expected a title, no less—a rich gift and a title. That is what she was after. And what did she get?" He slapped his knees, doubled up with mirth. "All she got was a brass samovar, and not a sign of a title! But we are more generous—we, her neighbors. We gave her a title. We call her the Czarina Ujakova." And he almost touched the earth in the extremity of his mirth.

But when the so-called Czarina stood before me, barefoot, red and blown from her bake pans, I had some difficulty in believing that she was worth $100,000, let alone the possessor of some of the finest amethysts in the world.

I had seen beautiful amethysts in my day, but when these gems, dragged from beneath a mattress, were poured out before me from the depths of an old stocking I gasped. Not one, but a dozen perfect gems, of a color found nowhere else in the world, none less than an inch in diameter, lay sparkling on the rough table before me in a little pool of light from the low window.

Kunz tried to hide his excitement from the "sharp-eyed peasant woman, wary as a fox." After a long bargaining session he acquired six of the stones, having paid "every ruble they were worth." One of the finest—a grape-purple gem, one and a half inches in diameter—went to the Morgan col1ection and is on display in the hall, in the large gem case along the back wall.

One of Kunz' last gifts to the Museum was a huge ten-pound garnet that was discovered during the excavation of a sewer at 35th Street and Broadway. According to Kunz, it was the finest large garnet ever found in the United States and the most valuable mineral to have been found in New York City.

Since Kunz's day, the Museum has continued to acquire extraordinary specimens. One of the most spectacular on display in the hall is in fact a world record. It came from Allan Caplan, a gem dealer in New York City, who has brought in many of the Museum's precious stones. As a young man, Caplan traveled to Brazil as a free-lance collector, and brought out extraordinary museum-quality specimens from the rich mines of the interior. On one of his first trips to the mineralogically unexplored inner fastness of Brazil, he passed through Belo Horizonte, where a local collector offered him a six-pound, colorless topaz crystal. Not knowing much about topazes, he declined to buy it, as the price seemed high. However, when he got back to the States and asked about its value, he was told that such a crystal couldn't exist; no large, clear topaz with crystal faces had ever been found. When Caplan returned to Brazil he purchased the stone, and later resold it to a curator at the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia.

On his next visit to Brazil, a quartz crystal dealer in Rio astonished Caplan by showing him two giant topaz crystals, one weighing 100 pounds and the other 156 pounds. Caplan bought them immediately and resold them, one to the Smithsonian and the other to the Cranbrook Institute, near Detroit. News of the finds traveled fast, and several wealthy museums approached Caplan to see if he could get them big topaz crystals as well. The Harvard Mineralogical Museum asked Caplan first, and so it was given first choice of any new specimens. The American Museum of Natural History was given second choice.

Sure enough, on his next trip to Brazil, the quartz dealer—a man named Carmo—showed Caplan photographs of three almost impossibly large topaz crystals he had obtained somewhere in the interior of the country. He explained that they were being shipped to Rio on a freight train, and that it would take weeks for them to arrive. "He told me," Caplan said in an interview in the
Mineralogical Record,
"that he had to wrap them with vines, because he had neither nails or lumber, and it was quite a job to get them to the railroad. The locality was not mentioned, nor did I ask for it." Caplan bought the three on the basis of the photos, and signed the bill of sale, as he had to return to the United States before the crystals would arrive at the Brazilian coast.