Blood Diamonds Read online

  Soon after slavery was abolished in Britain in 1807, the British took over the settlement and declared it a colony of the crown. In their efforts to enforce their antislavery laws—and impose them elsewhere—British warships patrolled the West African coast and intercepted slave vessels bound for the Americas, turning the islands off Sierra Leone into processing centers for “recaptives.” After a short time on Bunce Island or the Banana Islands, many of the recaptives were simply put on skiffs to the mainland; some of these lucky Africans came from villages just down the coast.

  Even though slavery was illegal, the money to be made kept the trade alive and well up and down the west coast. Tribal chiefs in Sierra Leone would stage slave raids on rival groups and villages and sell prisoners to Portuguese traders, who kept secret forts in the coastal swamps and forests just south of Freetown. Lookouts would scope the horizon for British men-of-war and, when the coast was clear, rush groups of slaves out to vessels anchored just beyond the surf. Convinced that they were destined for death, many captives would try to drown themselves in the surf, but the Europeans and their indigenous Kru partners kept a close eye out for this and thwarted many such attempts. In 1839, hundreds of captives were packed onto the Tecora, a Portuguese slaver, and sailed to Havana. They made land under cover of night because importing slaves into the Americas was illegal. But in a parallel to today’s diamond controversy, slave traders dodged this by obtaining passports for their prisoners that showed they were Cuban. Fifty-three of these Sierra Leoneans were purchased by Spanish slave owners and put aboard the 60-foot coastal schooner Amistad for transport to Puerto Príncipe. But during the voyage, a Mende slave used a nail to pick his locks and freed his fellow captives. They took over the ship and wound up not back in Africa, as they’d planned, but in Mystic, Connecticut. In the resulting landmark trial, the would-be slaves were freed by the U.S. Supreme Court, aided in no small part by one their attorneys, former U.S. president John Quincy Adams.

  Back in Sierra Leone, by 1850 more than 100 ethnic groups were living in Freetown, a mixture brought about by Britain’s policy of releasing recaptives at Port Kissy. Like an African version of New York City, Freetown’s heterogeneous population occupied different parts of town and the different groups lived fairly harmoniously. Collectively, the Freetown settlers became known as Krios and they developed a language of the same name that allowed them to communicate outside their various native tongues. Krio is a hodgepodge of African dialects, its main component being English: The result is a mellifluous babble of pidgin slang, Queen’s English, and tribal terms.

  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 go
ods 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 will
ing 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

  Because of their stable prices and the ease with which they can be moved around the world undetected, diamonds have been the currency of choice for a lot more than weapons that go to African insurgencies. They’ve been used to buy drugs in South America and they’ve been used by the Soviet KGB to pay spies. Former FBI agent Robert Hanssen was reportedly paid $1.4 million in cash and diamonds to provide the Russians with intelligence information and classified documents.

  The amount of diamonds that are smuggled by individuals, though, is relatively small compared to the wealth of diamonds that can be stolen from the mines themselves by workers. Security at diamond mines the world over makes antiterrorism security efforts at airports look like they’re conducted by the Boy Scouts. In Namibia, for instance, at the De Beers–owned Oranjemund claim, the only cars in the town in the 1970s were company cars that could never leave its borders. Private vehicles were banned when an enterprising engineer removed several bolts from the chassis of his car, bored out the middle for holding diamonds, and then screwed them back in tight. The fact that he was actually caught is testament in itself to how high the security was; from then on, De Beers outlawed new cars. All vehicles in the town had to stay there until they rusted away. One worker at the same site stole diamonds by tying a small bag to a homing pigeon, which would fly the diamonds back to his house.4 One day, he got too ambitious and overloaded his winged courier; the pigeon was so laden with stolen diamonds, it couldn’t fly over the fence and was discovered by security guards a short time later. They reclaimed the diamonds and let the bird go, following it to the man’s home, where he was arrested after work.