Word: emeralds
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...born a century too soon. Today he would have bought himself an act, taken lessons from experts and played the Emerald City to standees. Across the country, magic is enjoying unprecedented fortune. Says Dai Vernon, 80-year-old dean of American magic: "I've been conjuring for six decades; I don't know when the field has been so fertile." James Randi, a prestidigitator who tours with the Alice Cooper show, agrees: "Magic has had red-letter days. But this is a red-letter year." The prediction is no illusion...
...neglected subgenre: the caper novel. In The Spy in the Ointment (1966), a typographical error on an FBI list caused a pacifist to become mixed up with bomb-throwing subversives. In The Hot Rock (1970), a raffish foursome engineered several fiendishly clever jewel thefts in search of a rare emerald that turned out never to be where it was supposed to be. In Bank Shot (1972), a suburban bank temporarily operating out of a mobile home was robbed by a gang that simply hauled it away...
...Colombia, which produces almost all the world's emeralds, the gems lie so close to the earth's surface that they have been turned up by foraging pigs. Yet from the viewpoint of the government's supposed emerald monopoly, most of the stones might as well be buried beyond reach. The real rulers of the jungle-matted minefields are the esmeralderos (emerald buccaneers); they buy and steal illegally mined stones, smuggle them out, engage in endless shootouts and wind up with most of the estimated $150 million that global sales of Colombian emeralds generate each year...
Tropical Klondike. The illegal emerald trade has slowed somewhat since last July, when the government sent in an army division to seal off the biggest mining area and root out thousands of squatters, grifters and smugglers who had turned the zone into a kind of tropical Klondike. Yet many prospectors continue to slip by the army patrols, hole up in caves by day and dig for emeralds through the night with the help of masked flashlights. The army itself is not immune to emerald fever. Says Willis Bronkie, one of Bogota's biggest and most successful emerald dealers...
Along Bogota's 14th Street, the trading center for small-time dealers, illegally mined emeralds are openly hawked on the sidewalks or in seedy bars and backrooms. The esmeralderos sell the better gems to major dealers or big international combines, which smuggle them out by light planes from Colombia's hundreds of private airstrips. The biggest emerald buyers by far in recent years have been the Japanese, who have bought an estimated $300 million worth since 1967. Prices for emeralds in Japan have more than doubled in the past two years, and a dealer can be assured...