42 THENEWYORKER,FEBRUARY3, 2020
Lucara has been reticent to sell its larg-
est stones in this way. After the com-
pany discovered the Constellation, in
2015, it asked prospective bidders to
submit proposals for how they might
cut and polish the stone, in what is
known as a selective tender. Lucara also
retained a small financial interest in
the Constellation, so that the firm could
reap profits once the stone was made
into jewels.
The strategy worked. In May, 2016,
a Dubai-based firm called Nemesis, in
partnership with a Swiss jeweller, paid
Lucara $63.1 million for the diamond—
or $77,613 per carat. It was the highest
price ever paid for a rough diamond.
Nemesis recently unveiled eight pol-
ished stones taken from the Constel-
lation. The collection, as yet unsold, in-
cludes a three-hundred-and-thirteen-
carat emerald-cut diamond, known as
Constellation I, which is the largest
completely colorless diamond ever pol-
ished. In November, 2017, a hundred-
and-sixty-three-carat diamond, inter-
nally flawless and emerald-cut, was sold,
at Christie’s, for more than thirty-three
million dollars. François Curiel, a jew-
elry expert at the auction house, expects
that the price for Constellation I could
exceed seventy million dollars.
The Lesedi La Rona’s sale proved
much more controversial. In 2016, Lu-
cara instructed Sotheby’s in London
to sell the rough diamond at an open
auction. Jewelry is often sold at auc-
tion houses, but nobody had ever sold
a large rough diamond that way. Wil-
liam Lamb, then the C.E.O. of Lu-
cara—he is now a consultant—told
me that the firm wanted to see if there
was a broader audience for a stone that
was “literally a piece of art,” not to
mention the first diamond of more
than a thousand carats discovered in
a century. Lamb did not want to limit
himself to the traditional diamantaire
market. He could imagine a wealthy
private collector buying a rough dia-
mond and keeping it as an investment,
or as an objet.
Lucara’s strategy irked people in the
diamond trade, because it bypassed
them. Hoymans, the Antwerp broker,
believes that the decision to take the
Lesedi La Rona to auction was a mis-
take, and perhaps a political one. “It is
difficult to reach out to a group of peo-
ple that don’t have the expertise to look
at diamonds,” he told me. “With ex-
ceptional stones, it’s best to stick to your
business-to-business environment.”
Graff, the London jeweller, often
buys rare and large stones, and its
eighty-one-year-old owner, Laurence
Graff, is considered a bellwether for the
industry. According to several sources,
Graff was particularly vexed by Lucara’s
decision to take the Lesedi La Rona to
Sotheby’s. Lamb told me that Graff ’sirritation was amplified by the fact that
his company had been outbid by the
Dubai firm on the Constellation. Graff
denies that he was upset, and told me,
by e-mail, that he had passed on the
Constellation. “We inspected the Con-
stellation,” he wrote. “The rough lacked
life and we were not confident that it
would produce top quality diamonds.”
Graff admitted that he had found Lu-
cara’s decision to take the Lesedi La
Rona to auction unusual. “This indus-
try has decades of established traditions
and processes,” he said.
When the Lesedi La Rona went on
display at Sotheby’s, it was advertised
as a likely “D color” stone. The Gem-
ological Institute of America has a rank-
ing system for grading the hue of dia-
monds, and the scale ranges from D,
for colorless, to Z, for light yellow or
brown. Lamb and others at Lucara felt
that several diamantaires, including
Graff, were vocally dismissive of the
Lesedi La Rona’s quality. (Graff denies
this.) There was a rumor that the stone
might actually be an inferior E color.
It was possible for the rumor to take
hold only because the stone was too
large to fit in a normal scanner. By the
time of the sale, Lamb believed that the
old diamond world had turned against
Lucara’s stone.
Graff, in his e-mail, acknowledged
that he had doubts about the Lesedi
La Rona. “I knew it was a very, very
special diamond,” he explained, add-ing, “Until this analysis stage is com-
plete, we can never be 100% certain of
a diamond’s properties.” He went on,
“With a rough stone as large as the
Lesedi La Rona, you can never be en-
tirely sure exactly how it will polish
and what it will yield, and there is al-
ways great risk.”
Lucara put a reserve price of seventy
million dollars on the Lesedi La Rona.
If the price-per-carat range of the Con-
stellation was reached, the stone would
sell for eighty-six million dollars. Pri-
vately, some at Lucara thought that the
record-breaking nature of the diamond
might allow it to fetch a hundred mil-
lion, or more. Sotheby’s evidently shared
this view. The structure of the auction-
eer’s arrangement with Lucara meant
that it would make very little commis-
sion on the diamond until the price
reached a hundred million dollars; once
that threshold was crossed, Sotheby’s
would receive a substantial payment.
Eira Thomas and her father trav-
elled to London for the Sotheby’s auc-
tion, as did Lukas Lundin and William
Lamb. Representatives from Graff and
its principal manufacturer, Johnny
Kneller, sat two rows behind the Lu-
cara party. In the end, the highest bid-
der offered sixty-one million dollars—
well below the reserve price. Graff did
not bid. The stone went unsold. After
the auction, Lamb recalls, Kneller and
others from Graff descended on him
“like sharks on a piece of meat,” saying,
“We need to talk.”
“I have nothing to say to you,” Lamb
replied.
The Lucara group went to dinner,
in Mayfair, but did not drink the cham-
pagne that had been put on ice. Lun-
din remained confident that Lucara
would find a buyer for its diamond, but
Lamb was furious. When I asked him
if there had been a campaign to insure
that the auction would end in failure,
Lamb told me that this was “absolutely
correct,” adding, “The diamond indus-
try did not want us to sell that stone to
someone else.”
In the weeks that followed, Lamb
attempted to find a private buyer for
the Lesedi La Rona. So many people
viewed it that some senior figures at
Lucara wondered whether the stone’s
mystique had been punctured. In the
diamantaire world, the phenomenon is