The Lacey Confession by Richard Greener Page A

another, more important purpose to Joel’s visit.
    Solomon Barnato Joel, Just Solly to the powerful and powerless alike, may have been the richest man in the world. It was hard to tell, difficult to get an accurate reading on matters as personal as that in those days. Following the mysterious death by drowning of his uncle Barney Barnato, the founder of the DeBeers diamond cartel, young Solly Joel assumed total control of that vast enterprise. From his base in diamond mining, Joel branched out to gold mines and soon manipulated and dominated the world market in both stones and precious metals. A flamboyant character, who thrived on bravado and basked in the glory of public attention, Solly Joel was among the first of the great industrialists and entrepreneurs to invade popular culture. With no thought of profit, he bought up the famed Drury Lane Theater in London and established a stable of the finest racehorses in the world.
    His most daring adventure, the one deal everyone speculated about, was his strange and unique relationship with the Russians. When the Bolsheviks deposed the Czar in 1917, they found themselves embarrassed to become the world’s richest diamond owners. Centuries of accumulation, an act of unprecedented rape of Russian national treasure, had now devolved to and given the Communists the world’s largest, most valuable collection of diamonds. Desperate for money, hard currency with real trade value, and ideologically burdened with the Czar’s excesses, the Bolsheviks were easy prey to Solly Joel’s machinations. In a daring stroke of international hubris, Solly Joel offered to take the Czar’s diamonds off their hands and give the Bolsheviks the enormous sum of 250,000 English pounds, the most prized currency in the world. Moreover, Joel made the offer sight unseen. He would take the entire collection, as is. The Russians, in a sign that they understood nothing about money and really did mean it when they said they would usher in a new financial age for the world, accepted. They delivered the goods—in fourteen cigar boxes—and Solly Joel dutifully transferred the quarter million pounds. Improbable as it was—a schoolboy’s logic dictated otherwise—both sides concluded the transaction with apparent satisfaction. One of them had been had, and it wasn’t Just Solly . By securing the Czar’s entire collection for himself, Joel was able to stymie any possibility of the future sale of phony pieces, paraded as secret jewels from the vault of the late Czar. Had this happened, the diamond market might have spun out of control. As well, he completely eliminated the potential for any damage that might affect worldwide diamond prices had others purchased the collection. In this way, Joel ensured that all the Czar’s diamonds would not come on the market at once. Over the coming years, until his own death in 1931, Solly Joel was able to reintroduce, as he called it, piece by piece, some of the most spectacular diamond jewelry ever made. His financial wizardry was such, he did so while increasing prices, not depressing them. Of course, the Bolsheviks had no idea what those stones were really worth. They were the proverbial Christians being tossed to the lions. They were soft food for the predator. Solly Joel bought them sight unseen because he knew their actual value was perhaps twenty or fifty times what he paid. To this day some who know the diamond trade well say that figure was closer to a hundred times what Joel paid. Just Solly rightly figured the Russians for patsies. Why not the Georgians too? The purpose behind Solly Joel’s approach to Djemmal-Eddin Messadou was to find out about the Czar Nicholas II ten Ruble coins. He’d heard that the nephew of the Lion of Dagestan had tons of them.

The Present
    In the last year of his reign, Nicholas II, the Russian Czar, issued a new ten Ruble coin. Of course, it had his likeness on it—a side view, the