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Throughout history, we've been obsessed with gemstones. Trends have come and gone, but there are five types of gems that we've always gravitated to: diamonds, rubies, sapphires, amethysts and emeralds. Diamonds might get the most attention, but they're not the rarest gems out there. Of our big five shiny rocks, emeralds are particularly special since, geologically speaking, they shouldn't exist at all. So when an emerald weighing a third of a ton turned up on the market two decades ago, it caused some commotion. At least fourteen different people, as well as the government of Brazil, have laid claim to this mega-emerald. And in all the legal hullabaloo, the rock itself got its a restraining order.
This is the story of the impossible, supposedly cursed Bahia Emerald. [♪INTRO] Emeralds have a history that stretches back more than 2,000 years. Well, our history with them, anyway. Their geological history is a lot older. They're famously associated with Cleopatra of Egypt, although there's actually very little evidence of her personally collecting them. We do know that the mining of emeralds from Mons Smaragdus, near the Red Sea coast of Egypt, began around the time of her reign. For more than 1,500 years, these mines were the main source of emeralds for the entire world,
making the gemstones incomparably rare. That is, until the Spanish conquistadors arrived in Colombia in the early 16th Century, where they found the stones to be a favorite of the indigenous groups living in Central and South America. After the colonizers captured the mines there, which I'm sure they did in a chill and not war-crime-adjacent way, they started shipping crates of emeralds to Europe. Even with this new discovery, though, emeralds remained rare and highly prized. Because, like we said in the beginning, they basically shouldn't exist.
According to the laws of geology, there is no way that emeralds should be able to form. The emerald, of course, crystallizes anyway, because emeralds don't care what humans think is possible. Anyways. These hexagonal and prismatic gemstones are a variety of the mineral beryl, colored green by chromium and vanadium. But here's the thing. To make one of these, you need to combine elements that are normally found in completely different parts of the Earth. Beryllium, the necessary component of any beryl, lives in the upper crust.
It's a relatively small metal ion that slips easily out of most crystals, so when a molten magma is cooling, beryllium is only trapped in the minerals left behind at the very top because everything else has solidified and it has nowhere left to go. On the other hand, chromium and vanadium are deep earth metals, found in the mantle. These metal ions are large and highly charged, which means they're trapped easily and sit nicely in a bunch of dense minerals that form early on from cooling magma, and stay deep down. The separation between high crustal beryllium, and deep mantle chromium and vanadium can often be many tens or even hundreds of kilometers, so getting the two together in a single
crystal should basically never happen. And yet, somehow it does. And when emeralds do form, they can be spectacular. Which brings us to the star of our show, the only rock with its own restraining order. The Bahia emerald, named after the region in Brazil where it was found, is the largest emerald specimen /ever/ discovered. It's not a single crystal, but instead consists of several fat, deep green, hexagonal prisms embedded in a chunk of rock around 90 centimetres across at its widest.
Together, the whole thing weighs 340 kilograms, and it contains some of the largest emerald crystals ever found. But if you're hoping to get a look at this impressive specimen in person, you're out of luck. Because the Bahia emerald has been sitting in a high security vault somewhere in Los Angeles for more than a decade. Most people think it's still there, but it also might be in Brazil. I'll get to that in a bit. And also, the thing might be cursed. Bum-bum-buuuuuum! The case of this emerald begins in 2001 in the Carnaìba mining district in Bahia, northeastern Brazil.
Two American businessmen, Tony Thomas and Ken Conetto had flown to the area in a last-ditch effort to save their failing start up. The plan? Acquire $25 million worth of emeralds, and use them as collateral for a $100 million loan, to buy into an investment opportunity that promised huge returns. But when they got to Brazil, they found out that the shop where they were supposed to check out millions of dollars of precious stones was a total dump. The Brazilian dealers tried to rescue the deal, and took the two Americans to see something that might tempt them to invest.
Under a tarp, in a carport in one of the miners' homes, was the Bahia emerald. The asking price was $60,000. And now, this is where things get… sketchy. A month later, Thomas wired the Brazilians $60,000. He said it was to buy the Bahia Emerald, but court documents record it as payment for the initial smaller emeralds they'd gone to Brazil for in the first place. Thomas then claimed that the Bahia emerald went missing in transit. And he didn't file a theft report…. For some reason. But that was a lie, since it arrived in San Jose, California in 2005, and was picked up by Ken Conetto.
And how do you ship the world's largest emerald? FedEx, obviously. I hope they got package insurance. When the sender filled out the customs forms, they declared that the box just held an ordinary rock, or possibly a piece of concrete. Reports disagree, but its value was listed as somewhere between $100 and literally nothing. Now, we don't know if customs officials actually looked at the parcel at all. But even if they had, they could have been fooled into thinking it was just a chunk of stone. Because while it contained gigantic gemstone-quality emeralds on one side, a big portion of it is just a big, black rock. If they opened the box and only saw that side, well, who'd think that was worth anything?
To the untrained eye, it wouldn't be much to write home about. But to a geologist, it's a huge clue as to how the giant emeralds it contains came to be. Remember: these things should be impossible, thanks to that separation between their main ingredients, beryllium and chromium. But sometimes, the Earth conspires to do something strange, with beautiful results. In Bahia, the ancient basement bedrock is made from very dark colored, very iron-rich, 'ultramafic' rocks. These come from the deepest crust, so they contain high concentrations of chromium.
Element number one, check. Over time, the bedrock rose up through the crust, until more than 2 billion years ago, it was intruded by a massive blob of magma that contained large amounts of beryllium. Element number two, check. But for the most part, these two elements were still in their own lanes, chromium in the dark rock, and beryllium in the lighter intrusion. Except in one very special zone around the edge of that intrusion. Here, the molten magma heated up the pre-existing host rock right next to it and cooked it into a completely new kind of rock with a new mineral makeup,
in a process known as contact metamorphism. Crucially, during this cooking process, fluids flowed between the two bubbles, allowing elements to migrate and intermix. And that's how beryllium and chromium finally came together and made a unique hybrid crystal that we call an emerald. So the chunk of magmatic rock that arrived in California could have easily been as worthless as the customs form said, if not for this geological quirk. Instead, we have a gemstone so rare and massive that it's hard to even figure out what it's worth. Which was a problem for Conetto. After it arrived in California, the Bahia emerald changed hands a few times. But figuring out precisely where it went
and who owned it proved to be a huge challenge. Tony Thomas claimed ownership of the gem, citing the $60,000 he'd sent to Brazil. But when asked by authorities to produce the bill of sale, he declared it lost when his house burned down. The house fire did happen, but whether the evidence was really inside… well, let's just say that no one was convinced. Conetto, still working on behalf of the failed startup that started all of this, moved the stone from San Jose to a storage facility in New Orleans. However, it arrived just in time to be caught up in Hurricane Katrina, and it was trapped underwater for weeks when the city flooded.
Conetto later made a deal with a potential middle-man named Larry Biegler, who made a deal with a gem and real estate dealer in Florida. That guy tried to use the emerald as collateral for selling diamonds. But then when Florida gems guy couldn't actually source the diamonds for the deal, the emerald was forfeited to of all people, a Mormon from Idaho. Are you keeping up? At this point, the Bahia emerald was in El Monte, California, and Mr. Florida and Mr. Idaho were working together to find a buyer. But then in 2008, Biegler disappears, sending Mr. Florida word that he had been kidnapped by Brazilian warlords, and needed a ransom for his release.
Now I'm gonna fast forward through some of the details here, but this whole debacle ends when someone reports the Bahia emerald as stolen property and gets the cops involved. Mr. Florida and Mr. Idaho agreed to hand over the emerald, on the condition that they would not be arrested. And with the help of a SWAT team and helicopter, the L.A. county sheriff's department took the gem into custody. So there it sat while the courts tried to untangle the Gordian knot of lawsuits and counter-suits to find out who actually owned the stone.
Another problem was that the court needed to determine what the thing was worth, and that wasn't exactly easy. Unlike other gemstones, where their value is usually linked to their size and purity, emeralds are almost never pure. Because of the chaotic way they're formed, they typically contain networks of imperfections and inclusions, which are known to gemologists as jardin. A stone's jardin are proof that the stone is authentic. But these imperfections also mean that emeralds aren't that durable. So emeralds with lots of jardin are more likely to break when set into jewelry, and are therefore less valuable.
All of that means that their value is really subjective. But ultimately, an emerald is only worth what someone will pay for it. So what would someone actually pay for a 340 kilogram emerald? The lowest non-zero number is $60,000, since that's what Thomas paid for it at the start of this whole thing. But Mr. Idaho put down $1.3 million for a stake in selling it… And a New York gem dealer wanted to auction it with a minimum bid of $19 million, or a bargain buy-it-now price of $75 million. On eBay, of all places. One potential buyer offered $127 million in a combination of cash, diamonds, and watches. That man's name? Albert Einstein.
No, I'm just kidding, but it was Bernie Madoff. After eight years of painful legal proceedings, the judges from the LA Superior Court made a tentative ruling in the favor of Mr Florida and Mr Idaho, as they came closest to demonstrating a clear title. But before the case of the cursed emerald could be finalized, everything was turned on its head again, as the government of Brazil entered the ring. See, the two Brazilian dealers never got mining rights for the region of Brazil they were working in. So according to the authorities, they had no rights to the giant rock they offered to Thomas and Conetto.
Brazil wanted to reclaim this piece of their heritage which they saw as being stolen. And just days after the LA Superior Court made their decision to award the stone to Mr. Florida and Mr. Idaho, the Department of Justice issued a restraining order. Not on Conetto or Thomas or even the new owners, though. On the emerald itself. Which sounds odd. Like, those are normally for people, not rocks. But there's an obscure procedural thing that allows the US government to file a restraining order on someone's private property if there's a foreign government that has laid claim to that thing. So it basically stops a person from taking their property and fleeing into the night, since there's some kind of pending international claim to that thing.
In this case, the Bahia emerald. After the restraining order, the Bahia emerald stayed locked away in a vault in the LA Sheriff's Department. In 2024, the court finally ruled in favor of the Brazilian government. The U.S. government said it would repatriate the stone back to Brazil so it can be displayed in a museum. Except… they haven't quite managed that yet. As of 2026, which is 25 years after this saga started, there's been no repatriation ceremony, no news reports, and no appearances of the legendary cursed Bahia emerald. In fact, only a few people have ever seen it in person. As far as we know, after making its way across America,
entrancing gem dealers and wreaking havoc on lives for a quarter century, the Bahia emerald is still gathering dust in a high security vault somewhere in LA. So that's where this story ends, at least for now. And hey, if this wild tale has you wishing for your own emeralds, you're in luck. This month's Rocks Box subscribers are getting their own raw Bahia emerald in the mail. Legal ones. We checked. Every month, Rocks Box subscribers get a mineral or fossil sample delivered right to their door. If you want to learn more, head over to Complexly.store/rocks to poke around, peruse a selection of some of our most popular
Rocks Box specimens, or check out the rest of our cool Rocks Box merch. Thanks for watching! [♪OUTRO]
