400 Million Dollar Emerald

The information for this article was submitted to us by one of our readers. Thanks Homer!

It seems that just before Christmas of 2008 detectives from the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department opened a crate outside of a warehouse to find an object they had been searching for since September.

The object, an 840 pound emerald originally discovered in Brazil, had reportedly been stolen about three months earlier. The man who reported the emerald stolen was identified as Larry Biegler. He said he had the emerald stored in a warehouse for safe keeping but that two businessmen from Idaho had taken it.

When the two men from Idaho were confronted they claimed that the emerald was used as collateral in a diamond deal that fell through and they were simply collecting on the collateral put up by Larry Biegler.

Since the emerald has been found there have been at least five different people come forward to claim ownership of the stone. According to Lt. Thomas Grubb of the Sheriff’s Department; “It seems like the more we talk to people, the more people claim to have ownership of this thing”. The story says that apparently Mr. Biegler didn’t actually own the stone but was in the process of purchasing it when he decided to use it for collateral for another deal. This sounds like some kind of government deal, huh? Everybody gets money but nobody actually owns anything.

The emerald was originally found in 2001 in an emerald mine in eastern Brazil. The mine owner kept the rock until 2005 when it was shipped to the U.S. to be sold. During that time the emerald was submerged in seawater from Hurricane Katrina while it was being stored in a warehouse in New Orleans and then shipped to another warehouse in California before the two Idaho businessmen got their hands on it.

As it stands now, the ownership of the super huge emerald is limbo, waiting for the Los Angeles court to decide who the real owner is.

The black rock weighs in at 840 pounds and has green crystal cylinders the size of your arm sticking out of it. Those arm sized emerald crystals are considered so rare that the rock was appraised at a value of 372 million dollars before it left Brazil.

Now that’s a rock I would like to find!