Wilensky Exquisite Minerals - Magnificent Emeralds: Fura's Tears

[Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] most of our display is made up of Colombian emeralds simply because Colombia is truly the king of emeralds and the ancient Muzo people have a wonderful story of how emeralds began and it starts with the god Adi who's the Muzo god of creation he created the mountains the rivers the forest the animals he's created everything he also created a garden of paradise and to tend to his garden he created one female yura and one male tenia he told them that they could live in his garden and be young forever the only requirement was that they be faithful to each other so for centuries they've enjoyed their life of paradise together with no problems it wasn't until a very handsome man by the name of Tsar B came into their garden seeking help he was looking for a flower to cure all illnesses so fura out of compassion helped czar b and while doing that the compassion turned into love over a short period of time pena notices that Ferrara is starting to age and he realizes that she broke the faithful covenant that they had promised to Adi so tenure took it upon himself to stab himself in the heart and kill himself Feuer then picks up ten years dead body and begins to cry over four days her screams turned into butterflies and her tears turned into shiny green rocks thus the first emeralds had been born after the emeralds are born aa day turns futile and Tonya into mountains that is their punishment for not following his rules and czar v is now it turns himself into the river that divides the two mountains so he'll always be in between them and they're between their love and that is the mousou tale of how Emeralds came to be stuart Wolinsky has done an incredible job in bringing together many many of the world's best emeralds and we get to see it the best [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] actually I wonder whether people fully appreciate the amount of energy and how rare this population of material actually is you know I mean it's a spectacular and from different locations as well you know so it's amazing that you can get this many pieces it's pieces in a single place but you know you have to impress this on on the population just how rare these things are [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] you have somebody who is a very very well known mineral dealer that is putting on an exhibition of a very specific kind of a gemstone jump stillness of antiquity of great value and a great beauty and you wonder how somebody could accumulate this many of the world's finest emeralds it put him in one place and actually have an exhibition that shows them off and in a way that emphasizes both the color the beauty the rarity and the variety of localities from which these come so it's kind of extraordinary to see this you know I'm sort of known as a as a barrel collector and since emerald is a variety of barrel of particularly the green chromium vanadium containing barrel to see such a large display of these things all in one place and some of the most famous emeralds in the world it's really quite exciting [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] well looking at this exhibit I'm blown away it's a real treat to be able to see an individual piece of emerald of this caliber but to have you know 30-some odd specimens on display from the major collections and museums around the world is really an incredible thing and I'm also pretty excited about it myself having an affinity for Colombian minerals so to get to see these all together I think is a real special treat and excited to see the will be the will in skis continue to bring the art world in the mineral world together and in this case by bringing one of the world's most well recognized gems and minerals from the specimens ID to the general public here in the Chelsea heart market [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] there is no barrier between mineral collecting and our minerals our art maybe people have failed to recognize them for what they are but on the other hand minerals are nature's art whether it be crystals and the crystal forms that come up or these massive concretions that are found in France are phenomenal whether it be you know mountains or other geological formations art is something that is not just created by human beings and paintings or sculptures or what-have-you but art is what you see that you appreciate us as natural beauty and clearly to me minerals are as beautiful as anything in the world so yes it crossed anything he may be exposing this to phenomena to a lot of people but there's certainly not one of all of us you've crossed this barrier there's the art world in a world we just crossed the barrier made a big difference it's just exposing the fact that these minerals are some of the purest forms who are [Music] Rarity's established in part by number how many specimens were to have to go through to fill just two cases or three cases you know and establish that number relationship you know you're talking about the thousands and thousands of specimens that would never make it into these cases so the when you underscore the rarity issue I think that's that's critical especially when you look at the numbers that are attached with some of these things and that's a reflection of their rarity as well you know as they one fella pointed out in the as Ron pointed out in his presentation you know one specimen he finds it in a bag with ruff they didn't even appreciate it and that's the other part of the problem internationally in many of these locations they don't understand about specimens and the value of maintaining the you know that the premiere pieces that come out of a mind they're looking at these frequently is just cutting material but it just makes this up rare and rare [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] to me specimens like art has not to be hidden away and put away in closets and never seen by anybody so I know I made a habit of over the years of showing the exhibiting the collections that I have so I applaud anybody that does any in this guide and I've let my specimens to other places for various things again of course I'd be happy to see how Stewart is a very special person I'd be happy to display any of my stuff with him takes great care he has great understanding he has great ability to put things into perspective that makes a lot of sense and so I don't mean [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] Stewart I want to thank you again for the invitation and I want to congratulate you on getting the food obtain a story correct and it's so wonderful to walk in your front door and see the courts piece that represents the for Athena as well as the Emerald that is right there here it is the actual food Athena this is a geologic monolith to monoliths that are made of all of made of shale and they're they're quite amazing this is the Fuda and this is the Tayna and the reason I'm interested in reading it right is because even in Colombia people automatically think that well the bigger one is the man and this is the woman here but no this is this is the woman and this is the futa this is teh another man and the man is actually on his knees already because he's heartbroken because his wife was broke the vow of her marriage with a sign of a the river and the river actually runs in between these two monoliths so it's quite an amazing geologic masterpiece and and I love looking at it I I probably have more photos of it than anybody in Colombia actually it's a it's hard to get to but I have a motor thing and when when you can get close to it it's quite impressive and even the Colombians feel it has mystery surrounding it for example I got this far on the motorcycle my guide had a motorcycle we left them here we started walking in it this is like a um old Hollywood movie he had a machete he's opening him a path for me and we got closer to the Florida and there was a man named Jose Pat de Soto who started an emerald mine there because people are doing prospecting digs all over this region because along the Rio Manero is a fault zone a river or a stream represents a zone and that's where the hydrothermal liquids can come up and create emeralds so people are looking for emeralds all over the place here and mr. Potter pseudo he just had a little structure there and was hiring some men to start a tunnel but when I got there we what we saw was an enormous chunk of rock had come down from the top of the fort Athena and it crushed his building there was a final count and a desk in the dust and debris and and of course everybody left and never came back because this was the spirit of the floor that Tina doing this again this is one of the few taken from a helicopter where you can actually see there is a river that goes in between them I believe Robert Weldon took this photo but I love this photo because the photo Tina is visible from three different emerald mines this is Lapita emerald mine here's the real mean arrow this is Kunis Dumas but these are all considered Pizza mines also back over here from peña's Blancas you can see the four Athena and on a clear day from Muzo you can see the Florida Tina so I think it's very appropriate the name of the galleries display here the event another thing when you walk into the door right next to the courts that represents the protein is this fabulous thousand karat chigorin emerald and it's a great memory for me because I was a beginner even in selling emerald faceted stones I started business in 1983 and most of my business these 30 years have been selling emeralds because I never have enough money to be one of those guys that risks everything on rough emeralds and you either lose money or make a lot but it's so risky you have to have a cushion I never had a cushion and but when you buy faceted emeralds you can pretty much know what you're getting and you can still make a good profit so everybody in Colombia knows I'm kind of a nice guy and on the California guy but when I saw this it was like 1989 I saw this at a desk of a friend and I leaned over the desk I grabbed her I said this is it you gotta give me this dog could sign when I just the reports cuz it was right before Tusa and I took it the Tucson and I didn't know anybody hardly but I I know that gene Myron right here got the stone but actually I sold it I didn't sell it to but I gave it to Dave Wilber and Dave Wilber sold it directs Harris and then Rex Harris sold it to gene land I think that's how the story goes oh yeah really Wow that's that's quite a story but of the thirty-five beautiful world class emeralds that are on display here this is one of the most amazing it might be the only chip or stone in the display I I don't recall if I saw another one but it's fantastic and you see these secondary crystals going perpendicular to the main crystal well here was 1989 and and I had been an employee at GI a from 1980 to 1983 so the first thing I did when I got back to California is I thought well I'm gonna show this to Richard T little coat you know president of the Gemological Institute of America back then it was always fun to show him something unique or odd because he really appreciated gemstones and so there I am in the office and I gave it to and he's looking at it he's fascinated and and then I said you know some of these are so amazing under magnification so he went over to the microscope and something happened that I'll never ever forget it he's looking at the thing I know Mike so and I hear this sound clunk and he bumped it up against the post of this microscope and I was just like a young guy I thought god I could never you know tell him you know you broken by it you know I could I wasn't that type of I was about to die but luckily there was no damage no I mean he was a little sheepish she gave it back to me but nothing broke but I'll never forget that sound of that clock anyhow let's let's get on with the story here so this is the plaza bolivar in downtown bogota colombia colombia is the northernmost country in South America Bogota is the capital it's at 9,000 feet or 2,860 meters and it's a it's a colonial capital it's very cultural very traditional and it's a very pure culture because just think about it ever since 1988 when Pablo Escobar and the Midian cartel began their there basically what was called you could call it terrorism for the cocaine years of up till the mid to late 90s there was zero tourism so there was zero foreign investment and there's zero influence the culture remained very pure and it's a very community-oriented family or net culture and it's a delight it's a joy to visit even today because colombia has such a happy ending to the whole story now they have so much foreign investment so much tourism it's a cultural capital of all South America they call it the Athens of South America because of Chenango Botero the artist Gabriel Garcia Marquez who wrote a hundred years of solitude won the Nobel Prize anyhow in the 80s in the early 90s I bought a house about four blocks up the street and that's been my house ever since then so the capital city is right here it's a very convenient easy a tower to trip in a vehicle to Eastern boyacá where the emerald mines are and I always compare that to my friend that goes to Pakistan to the Swat Valley for his emeralds he has to fly into Peshawar get a bus to the border then cross the privets is an ordeal then ride a horse for two weeks and finally he's at the Emerald so I made this map because there was no maps that just depicted the emerald mines Moo so mine is here the real mineral River runs from south to north and along the you narrow rivers Lapita mine which has been star of the last 20 years it's been so productive that it's been a true rival to the mousou mine go squirrel coast quiz was also in the 80s a star producing fantastic emeralds but it's kind of on a wall right now it will come back and peña's Blancas it is kind of like chip or 2 or is way 100 miles the other direction but opinions black essentia or both our venerable historic mines however they grew sporadically they still surprise you with beautiful emeralds but months and months go by without any significant production so let's talk about rarity for me to be in the room here the gallery with 35 world class emeralds just just to look at one of them and I'm just moved by the incredible rarity that I'm looking at and you can get an idea of this rarity from simple geology these stones get formed maybe one or two kilometers under the Earth's surface and the same geologic forces that allow the crystallization of emeralds or any colored gemstone those same geologic forces as the stone gets pushed up towards the surface of the earth where human beings will find those stones most of them get ground into dust they just get grounded so right there is the first level of rarity that you have with emeralds after that most of the stones that are up towards the surface the miners themselves will break the stones pull them off the matrix mistreat them and the mining process itself often damages many of the stones so that an emerald which is it requires beryllium as well as chromium and vanadium here's another level of rarity that we have because it's so rare to get beryllium together with chromium vanadium because beryllium comes from let's see beryllium comes from parts mainly under the ocean and chromium vanadium come no that that comes from the ocean and beryllium comes from crustal sources and they hardly ever come together and you have to wait for plate tectonics to move things around over millions and billions of years and finally you'll get these two elements come together so that's why emeralds in general are very rare themselves color is another great subject in terms of rarity and there's a unique situation going on if you look at a piece of green glass it's green because the glass is taking in line and it's it's absorbing some and reflecting back to your eye something in the green spectrum of light and our our eyes human beings our eyes are very sensitive to the green color more than the other colors because that explains why as dusk comes and the evening comes the illumination goes down down down and and the the grays well though the Reds and the blues turning to gray but green is still green and finally when there's no sunlight left finding the green looks great again but our eyes are very sensitive to that but emeralds are unique rare again look at this this is a spectrum of an emerald you have some spectral lines in the red area and in the blue area but nothing in the green area of the spectrum what's happening let me read a quote from Carol Chatham who is a crystal grower and he explained the color of emeralds from a spectrographic standpoint emerald is not green but gives the eye the sense say of green emerald transmits blue and red light whose peaks and troughs are alternatively canceled and accentuated at the frequency of the green wave band proof of this is to look at an emerald through a filter that eliminates the blue band only that's the Chelsea filter to all you gemologists in the room the emerald under a Chelsea filter looks red a filter observing the red band would render the emerald blue so I I can actually demonstrate that to you I have in my pocket here this is a blue laser it's a just a regular blue laser pointer but it acts like a Chelsea filter so if you have an emerald in the room and I happen to have one here's it's gonna reflect blue and tell you touch and emerald which would reflect back red just as as I told you now another thing you're looking at here in the red glow of a green emerald is geochemistry and geochemistry is is fascinating because Curt NASA was one of the famous knowledgeable another crystal drawer he knew so much about growing and Emeril says synthetic animals as well as natural emeralds and how gemstones get their color and there is a way to determine if an emerald is from Colombia or Brazil or Africa and basically when I use this Chelsey filter the blue laser or a Chelsea filter put it in front of a well-lit Brazilian or African emerald like Zambian emerald the Zambian Irmo will not react it'll be green under this blight or it'll be green under the Chelsea filter because of higher concentration of impurities in the form of iron atoms in the stone so when you see a Colombian emerald glow read like this it what you're seeing is the absence of impurities in the form of iron atoms so if we're at a show and you want to see what type of stones are in the booth just bringing her 410 nanometer laser with you and you can tell who's got what there's a book called emeralds of Pakistan it came out way back in the 90s but it had the best descriptions of the geological formation of all the emerald sources in the world and this book was my guide as I studied emeralds in late 90s and and started to write articles about emeralds there was an interesting quote by mr. Caze me that he put towards the end of the book after describing all the geologic formations in every location in Africa Asia Europe even the historic Cleopatra mines in Egypt the Austrian mines and the North Carolina mines which are mainly of you could say generally a metamorphic origin and it's just type Rock but he goes he says the sole possible exception of our classification is of course as nature would have it the most important emerald deposits in the world those of Colombia he wrote this despite the importance in numerous studies of these deposits the origin remains unclear now that was in 1990 so the origin is not unclear anymore it's it's clear that Columbian emeralds grow in sedimentary rock from hydrothermal deposits deep underneath that they come up in fracture zones and the labels come up towards the surface they expand and cool and they crystallize emeralds usually in zones of calcite company buy pyrite and other minerals and one small detail about the Colombian emeralds is that the the pyrite itself absorbs the iron atoms and keeps them out of the Emerald itself although one source quoted that the pyrite forms after the Emerald you often will see an emerald with pyrite inclusion like Wendy just showed me Oh I have in my briefcase some some very small pieces of pyrite and emerald is going right through the pyrite so it's obvious that they form simultaneously or some form before and some formed afters it's so fascinating one more scientific thing we for we get to some more stories I really want to share this with you because this leads us to the mystery the magic of emeralds and and how nature continues to baffle scientists and I love it when that happens for example in my book everyone's a passionate guy chapter xx is is the poetry chapter I think I'm the only person that did this I gave money to poets to hold an emerald in their hand and the write their subjective experience about what they felt or anything that came to their head and it was a fun experiment and before he died dr. Edward Google and a great connoisseur from Europe he assisted me in this project cuz he was a master of the subjectivity of emeralds if you've read any of dr. gülen's writings on his certificates or even his books so and I learned two things one thing is that you kind of get what you paid for there were a couple of hundred and two hundred dollar poems that the guy was just really off their heads but there was a lady Nancy Berg who I gave her $1,000 for poem and she actually won one of the National US national project prizes for literature and poetry and the her poem is in the book it's fantastic I love this kind of stuff that I'm just a romantic I guess so starting the science we know that a crystal is different from Muhammad glass because glass the atoms and molecules are just amorphous ly thrown in there welded together but in a crystal the definition of crystal is orderly arrangement of atoms the unit cell or you can say the molecule of emeralds they stack very systematically form a crystal and here's dr. NASA again that I mentioned he's he was a just a genius about crystal girls and everything I want to quote what he wrote about we're talking about a kilometer under the earth he's talking about these nutrients coming together vanadium I really am silicon oxygen and aluminum and how is this all happening this utterly delicate process mile below the Earth's Earth's surface he says the speed and precision of the crystal growth depends on many factors including the temperature concentration and purity of the solution assuming an ideal solution each additional atom to be added from the solution must first find a location on the growing surface of the developing crystal but these atoms in solution are randomly moving about making random collisions with the crystal at random locations on the surface how can they find and build a perfect crystal their little secret is that the atoms that have been added at marginal locations can escape from these surface locations to allow other atoms from the solution to find a better location nearby better here meaning to be held electrostatically tighter to the crystal but these better locations do not occur in chronological order because they are determined by the collective influence of numerous atoms nearby the best position one microsecond ago may not be the position best for the atom right now therefore the addition and subtraction of atoms from the growing crystal surface proceeds almost like a group effort of trial and error it's like a collective group project so here you have this thing happening in Italy crystals are forming it's it's kind of magical and it hints at how nature itself is is at its finest level it is intelligent it's its kind of divine and mysterious and I love how nobody really can explain it it's like trippy Chi animals or trippy cheese at all I also write in the book about yes there's a scientific explanation for how trippy cheese form but I don't believe it it's mysterious and I love to leave it mysterious you know well we don't have to explain everything so anyhow that's that's that little story let's get to right here now talk about perfection crystal growth and of course this is another crystal owned by gene Myron this is more recent though this was sold at I think in 2014 it's it's twelve hundred and sixty eight carats and look at the light reflecting on the surface of that stone do you see a little perfection there and then here's another question for you how is it that on this perfect crystal edge with no damage and no chips or or any damage whatsoever all of these unit cells all these atoms they all turned the corner at the same time and they're separated by time and space but they all turn that corner same time I love the mystery and and the fact that we're not the only intelligent beings on the earth intelligence there's a there's an unbounded unlimited field of intelligence that we're drawing from I love looking at that picture and by the way the pieces out here and then the darker over the two rooms here you can see some of the pyrite forming and just to illustrate how the pyrite and Columbian emeralds brings the iron atoms out of the solution rather than let them contaminate the Emerald so let's have a few stories thing is anybody that's over 55 or 60 that lived in the Emerald world they've got some stories that you really ought to hear and I don't know where to begin but Stuart noticed the extended clip for extra bullets it's unclipped ready to use we got used to this in the late 80s and early 90s and you pretty much had to ask permission to get out of your Jeep to look at emeralds but then after well I'll get to that later clay hands is my nonprofit organization as a heck of a story when we started I just started it 3 or 4 years ago I wanted to give back to Colombia I had a whole career basically 30 years working with Colombian emeralds I wanted to give back so I started clay hands it's legally a service in California and we have a legally sound foundation of the same name in Colombia and we teach and use earth based construction like Adobe pressed earth bamboo and by rickie and this gives sustainability it gives employment and so we were brand new we had some money that's another story but we I wanted to do something and so my dear friend father gabriel Mejia he's a priest in Medellin Colombia he's done fantastic I've known what he's been doing for the last 25 years in Midian he started in the early 90s to rehabilitate street kids delinquents addicts and homeless boys all between the ages of 9 and 19 and this a group of people that the state just doesn't have anything to offer them and they really are the Forgotten kids the most needy kids these are just kids that had a difficult start in life and father Gabriel was so successful in his rehabilitation that he now has 45 centers throughout Colombia the state of Colombia gave him to juvenile detainment facilities and and these two facilities had really bad reputations but father Gabriel was so funny he goes run out it's like an English school now they learnt off of table cloths you know and they themselves his rehabilitation of course is Catholic religion service but yoga also Transcendental Meditation it's it's working and and he was just in February of this year he was invited to the room to speak in the Vatican with the Pope about rehabilitation because it's such an important thing so I said to father Gabriel I'd like to you need me to build you a shed or a tool shed or a little house or something on your one of your compounds and of course there he's he knows how to work people here because you know I need a I need a a meditation hall for a hundred and ten boy so I I thought about it and and $63,000 later we built this this this is beautiful is 10 meters by 15 meters and it's on a cement platform with nice tile and we wanted to do a nice job and this is used twice a day by these boys and you talk to these boys and you see yourself reflected in their eyes it's just you know these are just kids that have a tough first part of their life they're gonna be great later on anyhow so I this is two hours north of Bogota I live in Bogota when I'm on my trips there but I have a guy named Miguelito and he drives me to the emerald mines he's from Muzo he was driving me here to sasame before we got there and guess what anybody recognized about Vegas gotcha if you've seen the Netflix series called narcos you know that Rodriguez gotcha killed Hubert de Molina in 1989 and it was a massacre he killed 18 people that day including Hubert de Molina who owned he was the main controller of the mousou emerald mine back in 1989 because he was part of the Midian cartel he wanted to get into the emerald mine because its first of all it's a trophy and second of all you can launder tons of money through an emerald mine and this became this whole story became famous in the Netflix series called Marcos but what I want to tell you is that this is from this is taken from the narcos series episode 1 number 1 and the Ochoa brothers are showing off their horses to each other and the narrator says and even by Colombian standards the Emeril business is a pretty tough business and my friends and I'm on unit there right but this is the actual compound where hail dr. Molina was killed and Miguelito we're driving there and Miguelito tells me wow this is this is the compound where the movie was done I don't believe in and but I checked it in at Renetta it was and and what happened was that after the massacre the Colombian government took it and held it for five years because its ownership was questionable especially since it was a drug killing and they saw if either Gabriel doing beautiful to have rehabilitating kids and so that the Colombian government gained this comp it's a whole compound on like ten acres they gave it to father Gabriel and that's where I drove and that's that's how my nonprofit got started and we completed a big circle of twenty eight years because guess who donated some money to our endeavors to build the compound Edwin Molina the grandson of a belter Molina was killed in that massacre for three years from 2014 to 2017 I worked for the mousou emerald company a us-based houston-based company that purchased and now operates the Muzo emerald mine in Colombia and it was it was the culmination of my whole career is so wonderful to be surrounded by emeralds I was out at the mine during a huge production and the production was in soft rock you could see how nicely hexagonal a lot of these pieces came out and so it was quite a thrill and then back in Bogota I helped set up the cutting the faceting the oil treatment of emeralds along with the pricing and marketing of the stones through European sources for me it was just wonderful every two months I would be in a room with two three hundred faceted term completed emeralds faceted emeralds and I'd have to put a price on all of them talk about subjectivity here because this is what we love about colored stones in general colored stones there's no price list not like diamonds where you can determinants of color the clarity go over to the price list and you got your price and they take the discount from you know all that you can be an accountant you know do that not not that there's anything wrong with the counts mission but colored stone people are as unique as the stones they sell because every single stone faceted or otherwise it's a work of art and you have to agree definite ago she had an agree subjectivity on a price there's no price list we love it we love it and now here's another story my wife's not here tonight so I can tell this story this is a Hernando sign chance he was he started out as one of the security men for Victor Carranza and which means that in the early 90s and mid 90s he he was in a number of gun fights because as soon as dr. Rodriguez killed her Thumbelina it was the start of what we call the Emerald wars the Netflix series on narcos went off to explain and show the whole narco thing that happened with the cocaine but the Emerald Wars was a separate thing started by gotcha Rodriguez and basically the the cartel was trying to take over them the mine and and it didn't happen because the emerald miners are a pretty tough group of guys thanks to him and some other guys so he's had a rough beginning in his life but he became the confidant of Victor Carranza started selling his brother in him started selling emeralds and look at this piece here gee Myron is nodding his head yes he knows this piece is called el Poco it's 443 carrots and it's a perfect hexagon this is another story and this one got cut but let's let's hear about this piece 443 carats it's exactly 4 inches tall and 1 inch wide the thing about it was it was top color absolutely the best color from Lapita mine and so it wasn't easy to sell because the price it was worth 1.2 million dollars maybe a little more it stayed in Columbia for a couple years finally Hernando gave it to me to bring to the United States and do what we always do with these rare pieces take it to the Van Pelt's get Hollywood photo taken of it take it to gie and have them do a cert and maybe leave it in their museum for a few months you know this is how you get things happening with these rare pieces and I did that and I even did more this happens to be our Nando's think his farm he had 25 horses at this farm each horse had a beautiful wooden little apartment I'd have to say and above the door with these huge iron hinges was the name of the horse carved in stone no skies in another world anyhow this is the DIA displayed at areata way put together this was a famous necklace so I even had an artist in Colombia do a painting of Le topo because it was just it was an iconic stone so these are the the Muisca Indians all the symbols of the the food at aina there was a foot attain again the moon the Stars the Sun the fire little here's mineral specimens Veronica so what was happening was I was down in Colombia I was actually leading a tour of the emerald mine with the Bowers Museum of cultural history Santa Ana led by Pierre Keller and but I got a phone call on my cell phone that Ronald we have to get that stone nearly took her to New York because mr. so-and-so is gonna buy it and we got negotiated so you got against well no I can't do that I'm in Columbia right now and he goes oh you gotta do it science so I called my wife you know she's back home and she knows my hiding place ever put the important stuff in the safe because that's first place any thief is gonna go all my important stuff is in the hiding places you know but my wife got it out and and I told her how to put it in the box and I called Brinks to come and get it you know and it was I did I shouldn't have any how so because see this piece it had its little Stan and had some lights you know and other things so she got it in the box and sent it to New York with breaks and I went into it I got another phone call from New York a few days later but at that moment I was taking the group into a tunnel but there goes they go we open the box the stone is not in the box it is stolen what happened and I go well it it had to be in the box did you should call a police I don't know what else to do with it the stone was in the box too you know and it got to you through brink Sam I verified that it was a right then I went in the top so so so an hour later I come out because I'd already called my wife and she already verified that she sent it and the Brinks guy and all that so when I'm out of the tunnel again in another hour goes by I thought well I'll just call Linda again Linda are you sure and then and then she goes well yes and then there's long there's this pause on the phone and she goes it's on the printer she got everything in the box it but it was all the printer II was gonna go in last you know because it's sitting on the printer okay so now I have to tell you that I have to tell you that Hernando because he was Victor cadance's number one man Carranza suffered several attempts on his life but there's a YouTube video that went viral in Colombia because a number Sanchez suffered an assassination attempt at a men's clothing store where he's looking at some jackets and the film the store camera shows an assassin running in shooting him five times with a 32 caliber gun and as he's falling towards the floor he pulls out his gun and shoots back at the guy that's trying to kill him and he wounded the man the man got away but he survived with five bullets he he lost a kidney and he's only he's blind in one eye but he's okay I saw him just eight days ago in Colombia but anyhow here's the culmination of this story where don't we love stories as colored stone people okay here's so I'm I'm in Bogota a couple of years ago with I think it was the October symposium on emeralds and they're not though was there the whole emerald industry Bogota was there and we were kind of standing around and talked to him and he turns and he goes Ronald do you know and when your wife lost that emerald I felt worse luckily Linda was not there but everything's okay now but because of the price of that stone it it belongs in this gallery but unfortunately nobody came up with the money for that stone it was faceted and to some many stones it was a little bit over color you know the pastor had to make very shallow pavilions to allow the body color to come through and bring out the beauty of that color but some time went by and now it's just a good memory if you go to youtube and look up the 400 million-dollar emerald you'll see the National Geographic Explorer show 55 minutes and the first half of the show is about Columbia and that's me and this was made in Hollywood how do you like this gene would you like to have this mineral species this is how good Hollywood could be at making stuff out of fiberglass and trap plastic so anyhow that I guess we could just end the story there and thank you and and I thank the gallery for supporting clay hands were a new nonprofit and we have big plans father Gabriel here will be involved in our next project as well so thank you [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] you you

Channel: bluecapproductions

Views: 27,386

Keywords: Mineral, collecting, quartz, fluorite, calcite, emerald, emeralds, colombia, Colombia emeralds, crystals, mineral collecting, fine minerals

Id: GK8xQfIXxlE

Length: 64min 2sec (3842 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 02 2019