From
Diamond Robbery
by Mark Twain
Tom Sawyer talking:
"That's him!--that's the other one. If it would only come a good black stormy night and I could get ashore. You see, they've got spies on me. They've got a right to come up and buy drinks at the bar yonder forrard, and they take that chance to bribe somebody to keep watch on me--porter or boots or somebody. If I was to slip ashore without anybody seeing me, they would know it inside of an hour."
So then he got to wandering along, and pretty soon, sure enough, he was telling! He was poking along through his ups and downs, and when he come to that place he went right along. He says:
"It was a confidence game. We played it on a julery-shop in St. Louis. What we was after was a couple of noble big di'monds as big as hazel-nuts, which everybody was running to see. We was dressed up fine, and we played it on them in broad daylight. We ordered the di'monds sent to the hotel for us to see if we wanted to buy, and when we was examining them we had paste counterfeits all ready, and THEM was the things that went back to the shop when we said the water wasn't quite fine enough for twelve thousand dollars."
"Twelve-thousand-dollars!" Tom says. "Was they really worth all that money, do you reckon?"
"Every cent of it."
"And you fellows got away with them?"
"As easy as nothing. I don't reckon the julery people know
they've been robbed yet.
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He Swallowed Diamonds!
A former Namibia De Beers (Namdeb) diamond corporation employee was convicted in the High Court Thursday of the theft of 51 diamonds worth 19,745,046 Namibian dollars (U.S. $2.5 million).
Gert Johannes Feris, 38, was found to have concealed the gems, with a mass of 70,30 carats, by swallowing them on 16 September 1999 at the southern diamond mining town Oranjemund.
Acting High Court judge Annel Silungwe adjourned the case until 22 November for sentencing.
Through his legal counsel, Advocate Richard Metcalfe, Feris admitted that he had the intent to sell them for his personal use.
He also confirmed to the court that the stolen gemstones were found inside his stomach after he had swallowed them in an attempt to pass an X-ray checkpoint at the mine's Personnel Control Centre.
Mitigating for his client, Advocate Metcalfe submitted that Feris had shown great remorse for his wrongdoing by pleading guilty to the main charge.
He said that his client did not make any financial gain from the stolen gemstones and, therefore, the court should not break him by imposing a prison term.
"It
serves no purpose at all to send him to jail", he argued.
By
Jane Prendergast
The Cincinnati Enquirer
People paid her
to clean their houses. But once inside, police say, she helped herself to a little
extra compensation and pawned it or buried it in her back yard.
Investigators tracked pawned jewelry to as far away as Chicago to piece together their case against Kelly Shell, operator of Maid Easy Cleaning Service.
Ms. Shell, 38, of Anderson Township, has been indicted on five counts of felony theft. She is accused of taking more than $37,000 worth of jewelry, including a 2-carat diamond ring.
The alleged serial thefts began to unravel when one client called police to report she suspected her cleaning lady of stealing some jewelry, Cincinnati Police Detective Mike Phillips said.
The client then decided to check with some other people who hired the same service, he said, and that turned up more suspicious clients and more missing jewelry.
That led Detectives Phillips and Tina Ziegler to pawn shops in Amelia and Springdale, where stolen items were found, and to a Florence store where some items were sold, he said.
The Springdale shop had sent the diamond ring, pawned for $3,000, to be repaired in Chicago, but it has since been returned to its owner.
Ms. Shell admitted to the thefts in stages, Detective Phillips said, first denying some but then leading them to a package wrapped in duct tape that she had buried under a back-yard shed.
Ms. Shell also is accused of taking a blank prescription pad from a physician's home. Police are investigating some prescriptions written on the stolen pad.
She faces up to 6 1/2 years in prison if convicted.
