Gem dealer Sahabudeen Nizamudeen carried the radioactive jewel in his breast pocket for weeks before his commercial instinct told him he could get rich if he discovered the stone’s secret.
Nizamudeen found out how his chrysoberyl–popularly known as a cat’s eye–was changed from a pale yellow color worth about $1,200 to a honey color with a value of $5,000.
But instead of making a fortune, he lost his shirt.
“I thought if I knew how it was done I could go into a lucrative partnership with a laboratory,” the rueful gem merchant said at his office in Bangkok’s Silom Road last week.
Nizamudeen discovered that the cat’s eyes–which came from India–had been bombarded with dangerous amounts of radiation to change their color. Gem experts suspect as many as 1,000 “nuked” cat’s eyes may be in circulation, mainly in Asia but possibly also in Europe and the United States.
“Don’t buy dark brown cat’s eyes,” advised Gary Detroit of the Bangkok Center for Gemstone Testing.
The racket has rocked Bangkok, considered the world capital of gem trading, where jewelers and traders live elbow to elbow on Silom Road and entire buildings, with fortified steel doors and huge office safes, are occupied by dealers catering to buyers from around the globe.
News of the treatment has deflated the gem market, already thumped by the recession in Asia.
“I haven’t sold a single cat’s eye since the story broke,” complained jeweler Jay Ar last week at the Galleria Plaza. “I think it’s all a gimmick devised by someone who wants to bring down the price, then buy them all up cheaply. Asians just love cat’s eyes.”
The only genuine honey-colored cat’s eyes are found in Tanzania, Mozambique and Sri Lanka. But the mines in those countries are virtually exhausted.
Radiation bombardment, in fact, has been employed for years in Asia to convert a cheap light blue topaz into an expensive dark blue topaz and give a pale pink tourmaline a deep pink look.
Experts estimate 90 percent of all rubies and sapphires are heat treated to intensify their colors. Other gems are crudely dyed and need to be dipped in acid to ascertain if their color is real.
And some stones are “cooked.”
“Once upon a time, light blue or white sapphires were so cheap you bought them by the kilos and filled fish tanks with them,” said Detroit. “But now you treat them in a furnace with a heat recipe which is kept secret by those who do it. They turn the sapphires into a deep blue which makes them expensive.
“If you can work out the right combination, when to cool them, when to add atmosphere or extra heat, you can get unusual colors and make a lot of money.”
Detroit says an Englishman called Sir William Cook radiated gems at the turn of the century by using barium salt to turn diamonds green.
Topazes and tourmalines bombarded by electron beams or neutrons are usually kept in lead casings until their radiation level goes down to safe levels, but that probably was not done in the case of the cat’s eyes.
“I suspect the cat’s eyes were released right after radiation because someone needed the money and wasn’t worried about doing damage to others,” Detroit said. “The stones were released too soon. They should have been kept in a lead case until about the year 2000.”
Detroit’s laboratory–tucked behind steel doors in the underground garage of the Bangkok Jewelry Trade Center building–found that Nizamudeen’s cat’s eye was 51 times the U.S. radiation limit.
Nizamudeen has won few friends for revealing, almost by accident, what has turned into a sordid jewel saga. Worse, he is worried about suffering radioactive damage. “I have a family, I have three children. I carried this thing for weeks in my breast pocket to show to clients,” he complained.
In the office of his Facet Gems company he pieced together the weird tale of the 50 “glowing” stones an Indonesian gem trader sold him last July. The gems from Orissa in India were good quality and the trader claimed he had them certified as natural stones by a renowned Swiss laboratory.
“I knew the guy, so I took his word,” Nizamudeen said. “I carried some of them around with me to show clients and eventually I sold three to a Hong Kong jeweler and one each to two Japanese jewelers in Tokyo.”
But he remained puzzled by the flawless quality of the stones, usually a sign that a gem has been treated. “You only use gems without flaws for treatment,” he said.
Suspecting a novel method of treating cat’s eyes, he gave some of the stones to friends at Gem Source, a gem testing and certifying laboratory. For three days they put the stones through every conceivable test for cat’s eyes (which have no history of radiation treatment) but always came up with the same result: The stones were natural.
“I was still skeptical; they were just too perfect,” Nizamudeen said. “So I told them if they found the way it was done we could go into partnership. There was a fortune to be made.”
His friends finally sent one stone to the Center for Gemstone Testing, which can run checks for radiation. The stone set their Geiger counter to buzzing.
“Following the publicity, we had a lot of phone calls and inquiries,” said Detroit at the Center. “But we also had to tell people we would have to impound their gems and keep them in lead casings until the radiation level becomes legitimate.
“No one has come to test their stones so far.”
Another reason for people’s reluctance to check their acquisitions may be the official reaction to save an already wobbly gem market.
Manoon Aramrattawa, deputy secretary general of Thailand’s Office of Atomic Energy for Peace told the public in a statement: “We do not think that stones with the reported level of radiation that we have seen are dangerous to society. Radioactivity can be natural depending from where the stone is mined.”
As far back as August, Kenneth Scaratt, head of the Bangkok Center of Gem Testing, advised his clients and acquaintances that “several hundred carats of radioactive chrysoberyl cat’s eyes are currently being offered on the Bangkok market.”
A shocked Nizamudeen suddenly realized that he had 44 radioactive stones in his safe and five out among clients in Tokyo and Hong Kong.
He sent a message to warn his clients in both cities in August and refunded their money after the stones were returned.
Then he flew to Indonesia to return the rest of the suspect stones to the unnamed trader who claimed he had bought them from another Indonesia middlemen and had not been aware the gems were treated with radiation.
Now Nizamudeen has five radioactive cat’s eyes in his possession and another in a lead case at the Center for Gemstone Testing, where it will remain for several years.
“What did I do with the five?” The hapless trader looked embarrassed. “I buried them in a lead box for a few years.”
In the meantime he is not popular with his colleagues. “They keep telling me why did you cause all this fuss? But what was I to do? I am also a victim.”
