In a street café in the gangster-filled Yugoslav city of Podgorica, we meet a young diamond smuggler who doesn't want his real name used. Instead, we'll call him Dragan. He has a soft, boyish face, wears a black Versace t-shirt and sips a Coke as he explains how he smuggles diamonds from Sierra Leone into Antwerp:
"When I travel I use a Belgian passport. I fly to Istanbul and from there go to Freetown. In Freetown I go to a hotel that was arranged and meet with the manager who is my contact. He brings the diamonds to me in a room and I inspect them.." Dragan continues, "Then I pack up the diamonds in a soda can with a false bottom or in sandwiches, or in toys that I bring or in false-bottomed suitcases. Then I fly back to Turkey and from there to Belgium. It's all arranged so I can easily pass through customs."
Dragan says he works for a large, well-known, seemingly legitimate diamond firm in Antwerp. He wouldn't say which one. He estimates he that he's made about thirty smuggling runs from Sierra Leone to Antwerp in the past five years. He says he smuggles the stones into Belgium two ways: smaller hauls by airplane, larger quantities by boat:
"These are the large shipments of 200-500 stones. Sometimes we hide the stones in with a cargo of cotton thread. The boxes aren't opened at customs. We bribe the officials."
Once Dragan gets the diamonds to Antwerp, the money flows back to Sierra Leone. along with guns and grenades.
Dragan explains, "Here's how it works: We pay an arms dealer who then ships weapons to Sierra Leone. I was there two times when we delivered money to a Bulgarian arms dealer. Sometimes we just deposit money into their bank accounts."
In Antwerp's diamond cutting shops, rough diamonds are sliced and burnished into finished gems. If Dragan's blood diamonds are sold to a dealer who mixes them with legitimate diamonds, they vanish into the legal trade. So this is how conflict diamonds-an estimated 4 percent of the business-taint the entire stream.
