The BBC News reported that a Canadian man had been arrested in Windsor for swallowing a 1.7 carat diamond worth $20,000. Police xrayed the 52 year-old thief, however diamonds do not appear in x-rays, so they have forced the robber to drink several bottles of laxatives without any movement of the gemstone trapped in his digestive tract over the last week. The owners are eager to get back their stone, which shouldn’t have suffered much from its passage through a human body.
This crime is not as unusual as it sounds, for back in the last century Richie Boy and I were standing at the booth of an exchange, observing his senior partner, Blake Mannheim, show a 2-carat diamond to a walk-in customer. The sweating man exhibited a suspicious nervousness and we 2-10ed the man ie two eyes watching ten fingers, because the hand of a thief is faster than the hand of the victim and this old axiom was proven true by the quick thrust of the diamond into the thief’s mouth.
None of us had been expecting this move, but Richie Boy and I grabbed the man before he could flee the exchange.
“Let him go.” Blake ordered tightening his tie.
“Let him go?” Richie Boy and I were half the dignified jeweler’s age.
“If he wants it that bad, then he can have it.” Blake waved for us to obey his command. Richie Boy and I looked at each other, then the thief, who was smiling with disbelief at his luck. “It’s my stone. Let him go.”
We released the thief. He walked out of the exchange into the chaos of 47th Street. Blake regarded the two of us and showed us a diamond.
“You really think I would fall for that old trick?”
“You’ve seen that before?” I thought that I had seen most everything.
“When you live as long as me, you see everything at least once, but I wish I could see that thief’s face, when he discovers the diamond is a CZ.” Blake sat at his desk, content with having conned a con. It was a beautiful thing to see, but later Richie Boy and I agreed that we could do without seeing the thief’s disappointment after picking the cubic zirconium from his poop.
“Then the hand better be faster than the eye.”
And in cases like that it rarely is.