Blood Diamonds, Revised Edition

Undaunted, the philanthropists tried again in 1792, this time shipping some 1,200 former slaves from the United States who had fled to Nova Scotia, Canada; they later sent 500 more from Jamaica. It was during this period that the Sierra Leone settlers first started profiting from the country’s natural resources: To survive and make a rather handsome living in their new home, many of the settlers got into the slave trade, the irony being either lost on them or deemed inconsequential. Slaving was nothing new to Sierra Leone and the trade resembled that of conflict diamonds in a number of ways. For one, the history of slaving is filled with characters that seem to have been plucked from a lurid pulp novel. Consider the self-proclaimed wretch of a slaving captain John Newton, a man so vile “that even his crew regarded him as little more than an animal,” according to historian Lindsey Terry. “Once he fell overboard and his ship’s crew refused to drop a boat to him. Instead they threw a harpoon at him, with which they dragged him back into the ship.”

Newton, an Englishman, captained a specially designed slave frigate named, simply enough, A Slave Ship. She could carry up to 600 people, chained side to side and lined up like timber. The purpose was to pack in as many slaves as the ship could hold since an average of 20 percent died during the two-month-long middle passage to Cuba.

In 1748, Newton loaded slave cargo in Sierra Leone and weighed anchor into a massive storm that lasted eleven days. Convinced that he wouldn’t survive, he had a religious conversion on the deck, in the raging storm, bellowing out to God to “save his wretched soul.” The experience led to his writing the psalm “Amazing Grace” some 20 years later.

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.

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 goods 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.

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:

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.

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 willing 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.

Smuggling one or two small stones out of Freetown is one thing—smuggling a half a million dollars worth is something else entirely. If caught with an attaché case filled with rough at the airport, at best you’ll lose your loot; at worst you’ll be arrested and prosecuted. Smuggling large parcels out of Freetown requires a bit more cloak-and-dagger than hiding the goods in body cavities.

“The way it will work,” Singer explained one night at the Solar over Star beers in the bar, “is that we’ll look at the goods here, agree on a price, and then meet in Conakry to complete the deal.” Like most nights, the place was almost deserted except for the staff and a few guests who’d gathered under the tin-and-thatch roof to watch CNN. A string of pale yellow lightbulbs gave the scene a jaundiced look and bamboo curtains were partially rolled down around the circumference in anticipation of the nightly rains. Valdy lounged in another booth nearby, smoking and watching TV.

Conakry, the capital of neighboring Guinea, has long been the location of informal conflict-diamond trades. Usually Sierra Leonean combatants will trade small pieces of rough in Guinea for rice or fuel, but there have been allegations of weapons deals being conducted between the RUF and Guinean military officials. One such deal that was said to have gone sour in the summer of 2000 resulted in the RUF attacking Pamelap, the Guinean border town on the road between Freetown and Conakry. The Guinean military retaliated, firing artillery shells into Kambia, on the Sierra Leone side of the border, with the result that more innocent civilians were sent to Freetown’s MSF camp.

Guinea’s guilt as a diamond conduit is reflected in discrepancies between what it exports to Belgium and what Belgium says is imported from Guinea. For example, from 1993 to 1997, Guinea reported 2.6 million carats of official diamond exports at an average of $96 per carat to Belgium. During the same period, Belgium—through the Diamond High Council, the diamond industry’s self-appointed watchdog organization—reported imports from Guinea of 4.8 million carats averaging $167 each. “In other words,” reported the UN in December 2000, “Belgium appears to import almost double the volume that is exported from Guinea, and the per-carat-value is almost 75 per cent higher than what leaves Guinea.”⁵

People like Singer account for the discrepancy. By doing nothing more than shaking hands in Freetown, Singer doesn’t have to carry any cash into the country or carry any diamonds out. Getting the diamonds to Conakry is the RUF’s “problem,” even though it’s not any more difficult than U.S. citizens’ traveling across state lines to buy fireworks for their Fourth of July celebrations. If the deal is solidified in Freetown, RUF brokers often take the goods to the Guinean capital via ferry after bribing customs officials to ignore certain items of luggage. Bribery in West Africa is such a part of the culture that it’s like tipping a waiter after a meal—I did it myself on arrival in Freetown, paying a customs official a mere $5 to avoid a time-consuming search of my incoming luggage, which, as far as he knew, could have been filled with pistols and $100 bills.

If the deal is made in the bush, the broker takes a backpack filled with diamonds on a motorcycle from Koidu, for instance, through bush trails across the border and on to Conakry. The trip can be made in a day during the dry season. The RUF representative goes to a bank in Conakry and deposits the parcel in a safe deposit box. Buyers like Singer will then meet them in a café, adjourn to inspect the goods, and the money will be wired from Poland to be converted into cash at the same bank. In some circumstances, Singer said, the RUF rep will prefer to have the money deposited in a numbered account in Copenhagen for use later.

Guinean customs then inspects the diamonds and issues a certificate of authenticity that they originated in Guinea and—voilà—conflict diamonds magically become legitimate. If all goes according to plan, Valdy’s company will send a twelve-seat private jet the same day to pick them up and the diamonds will be in Europe by nightfall, squeaky clean as far as the Diamond High Council is concerned.

The certificate accompanying the diamonds is supposed to be the guarantee that the diamonds came from legitimate sources, but obviously such a guarantee is relative, and it’s not just an African problem. Perhaps aware that some stones coming into Belgium are from questionable sources, the Diamond High Council in Antwerp until recently recorded the origin of diamond imports as the last country to ship the goods to the city’s cutters and polishers. Therefore, a package of rough that began in the forests of Sierra Leone and was smuggled to Liberia before being exported to Belgium was recorded as being filled with Liberian diamonds. This is how Liberia can defy the laws of nature and outproduce South Africa by exporting 6 million carats of gemstones a year, when it can actually produce, at best, 200,000 carats of industrial diamonds from its existing mines.⁶ And this is also how the entire issue of conflict diamonds has remained in the dark for so long, allowing the RUF to launder Sierra Leone diamonds under a cover provided by the diamond industry itself.

If he has any moral qualms about buying diamonds from people who are going to use the money for weapons to kill innocent civilians and kidnap children into their ranks, he doesn’t show it. In fact, he’s never strayed from Freetown during all of his years doing illicit business in Sierra Leone, so he has no first-hand knowledge of what upcountry conditions are like.

But that’s not to say he doesn’t know what the rebels are capable of; in fact, he carries a small photo album of corpses that have been mutilated by the rebels to show to anyone unfamiliar with the horrors of the war. He squirreled it out one night, sliding it conspiratorially across the tiled tabletop at me. Four nude female corpses laying in the highway, hands and feet chopped off and laying nearby, genitals mutilated with a tree branch. A disembodied head laying on a table. A corpse minus its head and arms, which were arranged in a macabre pose some feet away.

Unmentioned, but widely understood in these circles, is that rebel diamonds are far less expensive than diamonds that go through official channels. RUF diamonds normally sell in the bush for 10 percent of what the same stones would otherwise cost through a licensed exporter, making them highly liquid and prized by people like Singer who can sell them at a large markup in Europe’s diamond centers.⁷

The way it should work is through the Fawaz model. The government issues mining and exporting licenses good for a year to people who apply for them and pass a rudimentary background inspection. The license holder is allowed to employ a certain number of upcountry miners, diggers, and buyers who are also licensed by the government. In theory, the exporter will bring diamonds to Freetown that have been dug up legitimately, and he’ll provide proof of that through a series of receipts and invoices detailing the discovery of every gem he wishes to export. The package is valued, taxed, and sealed in a box at the Government Gold and Diamond Office (GGDO) in town with a numbered certificate of origin printed on security paper, the government’s official stamp of approval that the package is “clean.” The parcel is also photographed with a digital camera and recorded in an electronic database, which is updated when the parcel is delivered to its stated destination. Once leaving the GGDO, the exporter is then free to leave the country without having to open the package again at the airport for inspection.

This is the system that was put in place as a result of UN Security Council Resolution 1306, an embargo on diamond imports from Sierra Leone adopted in July 2000 until such a scheme for certifying official diamond exports was adopted. But it’s not likely that this action did much, if anything, to help stem trafficking in conflict diamonds. Clearly, the RUF didn’t use official channels to sell its stones. For example, between 1997 and 1999, a mere 36,000 carats were officially exported from Sierra Leone, from a high of 2 million in the late 1960s.⁸ Although the war has prevented experts from forecasting Sierra Leone’s diamond reserves, it’s undisputed that annual output is much higher than the official export numbers indicate. When the embargo was placed on Sierra Leone diamonds, all it truly meant was that the traders who legally exported the 9,320 carats⁹ recorded in 1999 would have to smuggle their goods instead to Liberia or Guinea, which had no restrictions or certification requirements. During the period when the embargo was in place, everyone mining diamonds in Sierra Leone became a smuggler.

The problem, even under the new official arrangement, is that the RUF has Kono and Tongo Field, which have the best stones and the best prices. Anyone wishing to buy them in the bush can do so, even requesting a forged “receipt” to show to customs officials. There’s no guarantee just because someone has a license that the diamonds presented to the GGDO in Freetown were mined by his employees instead of bought from rebels in Tongo Field. In the end, it’s just easier to smuggle them; smugglers don’t pay any license fees or the 3 percent export tax.

A FEW DAYS LATER, Singer and I were engaged in our usual sunset activity: smoking, drinking, talking diamonds, and watching the news at the bar. At the time, the news was mostly coverage of America’s war on terrorism in the wake of the September 11 Al Qaeda attacks. We were fortunate to watch even that; the bartenders had long tired of the coverage and had begun to play a cartoon videotape featuring Alvin and the Chipmunks in protest. After the initial shock of the attacks had worn off, the locals began to look forward to watching the tape instead of the repetitive reports on CNN; earlier I had asked to watch the news and was resoundingly voted down, twelve Sierra Leoneans to one American. But on this night, the foreigners outnumbered the locals and CNN reigned, even though we were as bored of the coverage as they were.

On top of that, many “salesmen” were con artists trying to hawk glass to rich fools. The scam was simple, but bold: You’d pay your $100 for what you were told was a 2.5-carat diamond from a mine in Bo and think that you were going to make your girlfriend the happiest woman in town once you had the thing cut, polished, and set in jewelry. And just as you were thinking about how much money you could make doing this for a living, there would be a knock on the door and a phalanx of blue-suited Sierra Leone police would have you on your face on the floor of the guest house. You’d be dragged off as a smuggler captured thanks to a tip from an “informant” and jerked out of the hotel in front of the friendly people at the front desk. As you’re half-carried through the lobby you yell at them to please take care of your luggage, your return plane tickets, and your passport, which are all laying in a huge mess in the room, which, of course, hadn’t been paid for yet since you planned to spend a few more days there. You’d be shoved into one of their white-yellow-and-blue Range Rovers and taken to a sweat-tank at the station, and there subjected to threatening grilling from customs and the Ministry of Mines and Natural Resources. Your demands to talk to someone at the embassy are ignored and you’re given a few good whacks to the face. You’re fucked, you’re told, because you bought a diamond without having a license to do so. And then, amid the panic in your mind, a bubble of desperate lucidity comes to the surface: Can I buy a license now?

Ah, yes . . . postures ease . . . of course you can. It will be a license just to get out of their hands and onto the nearest plane out of Sierra Leone, though. How much money do you have? Six hundred dollars? But a license costs a thousand (unless you have a thousand, in which case it costs two), resulting in more whacks to the head. Okay, today’s your lucky day; we’ll take the $600, but you’d better leave the country immediately.

We headed into the night, the sound of UN helicopters carried to us on the ocean breeze that moved the leaves overhead like bored hand-waving from a local parade. There are few functional streetlights in Freetown and the short walk to Jango’s compound took us through an eerie collage of shadowy figures lit by the greasy flames of oil-lamps at sheet-plastic-and-timber roadside kiosks. Glaring headlights from UN Expeditions and Land Rovers speeding their occupants to Paddy’s periodically blinded us; when we finally arrived, we were seeing stars and tripping over our own feet.

Jango’s neighborhood was typical of most squatter housing in Freetown. Crumbling concrete housing blocks waved colorful laundry like Tibetan prayer flags. Black cauldrons bubbled with rice and cassava, creating a mist of cook-smoke that caught the firelight in a medieval light show. Streams of sewage and rainwater mingled underfoot in the pasty mud. From the shadows, the only thing visible of the people slumped on the porches and tree stumps were the whites of their eyes. Community activity centered around a slapdash kiosk composed of tree branches and UNHCR plastic sheeting. About a half dozen hard-eyed teens lurked inside around a battered boom box that was playing The Spice Girls at deafening volume, sipping tea. Naked children stopped in midstride to stare at the spectacle of two white men arriving unannounced on their doorstep after dark.

It’s not hard to see why. Though physically unremarkable—at 29, he has a typical African physique born of backbreaking labor, a wide friendly face, and a collection of scars from shrapnel and bullet wounds—his history as a longtime prisoner of the RUF has afforded him a certain degree of respect among his peers. And the fact that he now helps the RUF sell their diamonds to people like Singer has only added to his mystique, now seen as a man willing to overlook the atrocities of the war to become a businessman. The only business worth doing in a place like Freetown, as everyone knew, was brokering illegal diamonds. If those diamonds came from people who beat and tortured him for 18 months in the bush, well . . . the money to be earned was well worth putting that aside.

Singer introduced me and soon left to conduct other business. Jango showed me to his room: As narrow as a closet, the door opened against the bed just enough to allow a thin person to squeeze inside. A tattered American flag was hung over the bars on the window as a curtain and a small shelf held a collection of personal belongings: toothbrush, cassette player, ashtray.

WITHIN A FEW DAYS of the commencement of Operation Clean Sweep, the 1996 operation in which Ismael Dalramy lost his hands to an RUF ax, Jango was awakened in the middle of the night by a rocket blast. He was sleeping in the open, huddled under a palm tree and some bushes, near an open pit diamond mine, forced by his RUF captors to sleep far from the rest of the prisoners because he snored so loudly that they feared detection. But on this night, his snoring may have saved his life. The Kamajors had consulted their jungle gods and were told that success in attacking the RUF position was imminent. There’s no light in the depth of the jungle at night, not even starlight because of the canopy, and Jango was dead blind when the first detonation rippled through the trees. He sprang to his feet to flee into the night, running instinctively toward the rest of the RUF contingent, simply because they had guns and he didn’t and, as their prisoner, he was worth protecting. He hoped.

He never found out. Streaking through the forest suddenly alive with the hammering of automatic weapons fire and the mad designs of tracer bullets ricocheting off coconut trees, he heard a whoosh that was getting louder than all the other sounds. He turned just in time to see a rocket-propelled grenade sailing toward him like a neon football. Only random luck saved his life: His forward momentum carried him behind a tree, which immediately exploded with the rocket’s impact, blasting shards of wood into his upper left arm. Jango flew into a hole, a small pit he and his fellow prisoners had just begun excavating for diamond exploration, reeling headfirst into the muddy water, just as the tree toppled behind him with a deafening crunch. He screamed underwater and surfaced to the sound of bullets zipping over the hole like supercharged hummingbirds, rockets pulverizing trees, screams of death from his captors and their enemies, a strobe-light world where there was no up or down.

He passed out from the pain in his arm sometime around dawn, when the shooting slowed, but was replaced with the more menacing sounds of Mende whispers—the language of the Kamajors. Hours later, however, he awoke to find everyone gone and the water in the hole tinged pink from the blood he’d pumped into it. Jango was in big trouble.

The main problem is that he had no idea where he was. He’d been kidnapped in Sefadu, a Kono District diamond-mining village that is Koidu’s adjacent sister town, nearly a month before the attack and had been marched through the woods from one mine to another so often that he had no idea how far he’d walked or in which direction. He may have had a better sense of where he was if he’d been selected to be one of the RUF’s mules, men who do nothing but walk back and forth to the Liberian border, carrying diamonds one way and returning with shiny new RPG tubes and crates of rifle ammunition. But he was just a digger and he didn’t know if he was in RUF territory or Kamajor territory. And he had no idea where to find help for his injured arm. Sitting in his Freetown bedroom, he pointed to the mass of scar tissue on his upper arm and said he spent three weeks staggering lost in the bush, eating nothing but mangos, hiding from voices and approaching footsteps.

Eventually, he made his way to a village. From his vantage point in the trees, it was clear there was no one there but RUF, young men and women lounging on eviscerated pickup trucks and on the crumbling cinderblock walls of front porches, their rifles and machine guns slung on their backs recklessly, the scene highlighted with the soft orange glow of cook-fires in the early evening. Things seemed calm enough, Jango thought, and he’d already decided that he would take his chances with the RUF if he ran across them. His only option was to continue wandering in the forest. The smell of cooking chicken made his decision all the easier.

He nervously left the thick bush and walked into the town. Some people stared at him and his now-infected wound and some didn’t pay him any attention at all. He made it to the barrie, an open-walled structure in the center of town used for community gatherings in more peaceful times, and lay down on the ground in an attempt to be inconspicuous, evaluating his next move.

The mood was tense; many of the fighters seemed drunk and boisterous, sucking on “gin-blasters,” little plastic sleeves of alcohol like thawed freezer popsicles. Diamond smugglers from the Mandingo tribe hung out in the shadows, ready to deal with the RUF for their stones, to negotiate a trade or arrange a shipment. A female RUF fighter was arguing with a young man. Cheap transistor radios played rap music at a volume that completely distorted the tunes.

What happened next took less than a second, Jango recalls: Laughter cut off immediately, as if everyone in the square realized at the same moment that she was serious. The man standing at the end of the barrel twirled, his right foot lifted. He knocked the barrel aside just as she pulled the trigger. The round flew across the square and blew a hole in Jango’s right calf. It was the first time anyone noticed that he was there and he screamed into the night, suddenly surrounded by RUF, all of them screaming right back at him: “Who the fuck are you?” “What the fuck are you doing here?”

SOON AFTER HE WAS SHOT and recaptured by this new band of RUF, Jango was back at work, stripped to his blue brief underwear and standing up to his thighs in muddy water, slinging rocks and dirt around and around in a circular shake-shake. He churned the water with an abandon to task that is all too often found only in young children and prisoners of war. With four or five other prisoners, he was washing away the silt and clay from the stones, eyes trained to look for the gray, opaque ones.

If he heard these things, Jango didn’t reveal it. He was there to find the special rocks, not listen to the wind. Even the pain in his leg and arm didn’t distract him from the job. He’d given up, determined to do his job well and hope that he would eat that day. He was working on the “two-pile” system, an RUF digging regimen that allowed prisoners to keep any diamonds found in a pile of gravel he was allowed to wash for himself, but he suspected that it was rigged. He’d not found a diamond in weeks in the piles of gravel designated as “his,” but he’d been finding quite a few in those designated as RUF piles.

Around and around and around. Finally, he stopped sloshing his sieve, staring down into the soup of mud and gravel it contained. The sudden presence of four AK barrels shoved into his face confirmed what his eyes suspected. A hand reached in and plucked out a stone and dipped it in the water, rubbing away the stubborn clay. In the rebel’s hand was a medium-sized rock, gray and white in color, about the size of a small marble. Jango knew from experience that it was probably six or seven carats.

REBEL FIELD WORKERS are lucky to end their days exhausted and hungry. Many have ended them in a shallow grave. Workers sleep by the sides of the mine and wake at first light to begin the day’s digging. Except for the fact that the labor isn’t voluntary and men with rifles guard the prisoners’ every move, the process of extracting the jewels from the ground is identical to that in the licensed mines.

Capturing a diamond mine is as easy as showing up with a rifle and ordering everyone in the pit to start handing their discoveries over to the new bosses. The RUF sometimes sweetens the deal by offering to share the loot with the diggers, an arrangement that seems to the workers like a better offer than the rice and pennies they get from their legitimate bosses, as long as they overlook the fact that their bosses won’t kill them if they refuse. In addition to the “two-pile” method, which was favored by those who guarded Jango, some units instead allowed prisoners to dig for four days for the RUF, two days for themselves, and have one day off. Even then, however, most diamonds the diggers were allowed to keep were comparatively worthless industrial-grade stones or very small gemstones worth little in the bush. The good stones, it was clear, went to the RUF. Those who refused or argued faced being shot on the spot. Walking away was not an option. Most diggers complied quickly. But given the frequent alcohol- and drug-fueled rages of their captors, thoughts immediately turned to escape.

Running away was a near impossibility, although it had been done. Within days, the RUF captors have broken the men physically by denying them food and water and working them to exhaustion. Few prisoners would have been able to run far and, even if they could, a sprint into the forest would only lead to another RUF unit that might not be as willing to allow them to keep their hands, feet, or lives. But in the bush, diamonds are a currency even more valuable than guns, loyalty to a tribe of warriors, or belief in an ideology. If a digger was clever enough to steal or earn a cache of rough, and lucky enough to offer them to the right person, he may be able to buy himself out of slavery.

Stealing from the RUF is an often fatal practice, however, essentially an African form of Russian roulette. Jango recalled one man who was found with a large diamond tucked into his lip. RUF soldiers slashed open the belly of his pregnant wife and removed the fetus with a bayonet. The fetus died immediately and the wife soon bled to death. The man was tied to the corpses, doused with gasoline, and set ablaze, all on the edge of the mine, in view of the remaining diggers, who were forced to continue their work.

Stealing the good diamonds before they made it into the hands of the RUF overseers was a risky but irresistible undertaking. One technique was particularly ingenious. When learning to wash gravel in the shake-shakes, one of the first tricks a digger learns is to flip a sieve-full of water onto his face without losing all the gravel, a quick way to cool off under the African sun without having to pause work. Seeing the men dousing themselves with mine water was a common enough sight, but RUF prisoners learned to also flip diamonds into the air with the water and catch them in their mouths, whereupon they were instantly swallowed.

Over the course of 18 months—after he was recaptured and accidentally shot in the leg—Jango managed to amass six pieces, mostly through the dangerous practice of simply palming the stones once he found them and sliding them into his mouth when the opportunity presented itself. He later hid them in a cigarette pack that he buried in the ground near where he slept.

He’d already begun talking to some of the Mandingo traders who visited Kono, middlemen who organized the transactions between the RUF field commanders and banks, arms dealers, and expatriate rebel bosses in Conakry and Monrovia. Depending on the greed of individual RUF commanders, the needs of the fighting force, and the deals that were cut from day to day, the diamonds were sold in the bush to Mandingos or they were physically walked to Liberia to be traded at the border for weapons. The weapons deals were much more tightly organized—a mule team of twenty-five prisoners guarded by five RUF would hike to the border, load up with weapons, and hike back.

If a commander wanted a retirement fund, fresh clothes, or a new car, however, he dealt with the Mandingos. The system is ridiculously easy. A few good stones are passed in the jungle and a new car—or clothes or electronics—is purchased for cash in Conakry. The merchandise can be delivered to the buyer in the forest or it can be stored in Guinea for later pickup.

The nomadic Mandingos were also largely responsible, according to the UN, for trafficking Sierra Leone diamonds to points on the west coast beyond Conakry and Monrovia, as if they get cleaner the farther they’re moved from the scene of the crime. Places like The Gambia are as notorious as Liberia in terms of its reputation as a conflict-diamond laundry. The Gambia has no diamond mines and yet managed to export to Belgium some $100 million worth of diamonds between 1996 and 1999, the height of RUF mining activity. Every one of the Belgian companies that imports stones from The Gambia also imports them from Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Guinea. The explanation is that there are nomadic traders like Mandingos wandering the coast looking for buyers—for some reason, they often find their way to The Gambia, which has been described as a mini-Antwerp by the UN—and the Gambian exporters are simply and legally buying rough on the open market. But the only reason the diamonds would be in The Gambia, one unidentified company admitted to UN investigators, is because they were smuggled there to avoid export taxes in another country or to hide their pedigree as conflict goods. One estimate put 90 percent of all goods exported from The Gambia as likely coming from Sierra Leone.

Farther to the east, the same is true of Ivory Coast: The country is capable of producing about 75,000 carats a year from its modest mines but somehow managed to export thirteen times that amount from 1994 to 1999. The Mandingos represent a subcom-munity of illicit traffickers and they didn’t care who they dealt with, captor or prisoner, if it meant getting good stones. If you wanted to escape forced labor in an RUF mine, you traded diamonds to the Mandingos for your life.¹⁰

But before Jango was able to take the final step of offering a few of his stones to one of the dealers in exchange for being ferreted out of the mine, he was presented with another opportunity: a brand new mountain bike, left recklessly in one of the small hamlets near the mining complex by its owner. Seizing the chance, Jango walked as casually as he could over to the bike, calmly mounted it, and rode away on it, six hot rocks in his pocket.

But his escape wasn’t to be without some drama. After peddling all day through the green tunnel of the rain forest, he stopped to rest at another village. He still had no idea where he was, but the bristling barrels of AK-47s jutting from over most shoulders told him that he was still deep in RUF territory. Jango managed to blend in and everyone assumed that he was also a rebel. After a meal and some water, he prepared to mount his bike and continue the journey. A soldier asked him for a cigarette and, perhaps lulled into a sense of safety by his good luck, Jango withdrew a battered pack of 555 cigarettes. Three diamonds fell out of a hole in the bottom of the pack as he was reaching in for a smoke.