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]