TL;DR
The Bahia Emerald — a 752-pound boulder studded with emerald crystals and valued at up to $400 million — survived Hurricane Katrina, a theft from a Los Angeles vault, and two decades of court battles over who owns it. In November 2024, a U.S. federal judge ruled the stone should be returned to Brazil.
Some gemstones have provenance. The Bahia Emerald has a rap sheet.
In 2001, miners in the beryl mines of northern Bahia, Brazil, pulled something extraordinary out of the earth: a black schist boulder weighing about 752 pounds, studded with nine emerald crystals — one of them among the largest single emerald crystals ever discovered. The whole rock carries nearly 190,000 carats of emerald-bearing material. Even its name tells a story: Bahia is an archaic Portuguese word for "bay," named for the bay European explorers first sailed into in the 16th century.
And from the moment it left the ground, the stone began one of the strangest odysseys in gem history — through a hurricane, a heist, a sheriff's evidence vault, two decades of courtrooms, and finally an international ruling that would send it home.
It survived Hurricane Katrina
In early 2005, the Bahia Emerald arrived in the United States and was stored in a warehouse in New Orleans — where it narrowly escaped being flooded when Hurricane Katrina devastated the city that year. The stone was moved on to California, where its troubles only escalated.
Stolen from a Los Angeles vault
In September 2008, the emerald was reported stolen from a secured vault in South El Monte, in Los Angeles County, California. Sheriff's detectives tracked it to a vault in Las Vegas and seized it, placing the boulder in the custody of the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department.
What followed was one of the most tangled ownership disputes in gemological history. At one point, nine men, one woman, three corporations, and the Brazilian government all laid claim to the rock, as reports of the court battle documented. The stone was even listed for sale on eBay with a "Buy It Now" price of $75 million, according to Geology Page's account of the saga.
Two decades in court
The case landed before Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge John A. Kronstadt in September 2010. In January 2014, Kronstadt rejected the claim of businessman Anthony Thomas, whose bid rested on an appraisal valuing the stone at $372 million. After a trial in March 2015, Judge Michael Johnson ruled on June 23, 2015, that FM Holdings LLC — a company formed by Idaho businessmen Kit Morrison and Todd Armstrong and Florida businessman Jerry Ferrera — was the stone's sole and exclusive owner. The company had taken the emerald as collateral in a $1.3 million diamond deal that fell through.
Two days later, the saga took a stranger turn. On June 25, 2015, U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, acting on a Department of Justice request, issued a restraining order locking the emerald down so completely that not even the court-declared owners could see, move, or sell it. Brazilian prosecutors alleged that two men had knowingly received the stolen emerald and illegally smuggled it out of Brazil — and the United States began forfeiture proceedings on Brazil's behalf.
The final chapter arrived on November 21, 2024, when U.S. District Judge Reggie Walton ruled that the Bahia Emerald should be returned to Brazil. Enforcing the Brazilian forfeiture judgment, he found that Brazil's rightful ownership outweighed every American claim to the stone — a decision documented in the stone's full history.
WIRED, in its long feature on the rock, called it "The Curse of the Bahia Emerald" — and it's easy to see why. Flood, theft, bankruptcies, and the better part of two decades in a sheriff's vault: nearly everyone who touched the stone found trouble. You can see photographs of the actual boulder alongside that history.
Why are emeralds so expensive?
The Bahia Emerald is a curiosity, but emeralds as a gemstone have commanded fortunes for thousands of years. Here's why.
Emerald is the rich green to bluish-green variety of beryl, the same mineral species as aquamarine, and its green comes from trace amounts of chromium, vanadium, and iron. As GIA explains, emerald has been the standard by which all other green gemstones are measured for millennia.
Brazil itself changed what the world calls an emerald. In the early 1960s, large deposits of vanadium-colored green beryl were discovered there, and in 1963 the GIA issued its first laboratory report identifying vanadium-colored beryl as emerald — a landmark decision for the Brazilian gem trade, described in the Gemology Project's account of vanadium beryl.
What makes fine emeralds so costly is simple scarcity of quality. A vivid, saturated green in a clean, well-cut stone is extraordinarily rare — most emeralds carry the inclusions gemologists affectionately call the jardin, French for "garden." Add a fabled origin, and prices climb into the territory of the world's most precious gems.
Where to see a giant emerald
The most famous giant emerald you can actually visit is the one pictured above: the Gachalá Emerald, an 858-carat stone found in 1967 at the La Vega de San Juan mine in Gachalá, Colombia, now housed at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C.
As for the Bahia Emerald — whether it ends its journey in a Brazilian museum, as prosecutors there have long argued it should, is still playing out. But a stone that survived a hurricane, a heist, and two decades in a courtroom has already earned its place in gem history.
For more stories of the world's most extraordinary gemstones, explore Lumière Gems.