Glitter & Greed: The Secret World of the Diamond Cartel (Hardcover)

by Janine Roberts (Author) "Diamonds have helped arm many terrorists, according to United Nations reports..." (more)
Key Phrases: South Africa, New York, United States (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Review
"Brides-to-be hoping for a diamond engagement ring are advised to keep "Glitter & Greed" out of their fiances' hands." -- Boston Globe, Oct. 12, 2003

"Roberts delivers her information without any apprehension--it is a life's work, a piece to admire." -- Newcity Chicago, September 25, 2003

"Roberts’ research is meticulous and exhaustive... [but] she knows how to keep things interesting and engaging." -- Minnesota Daily, September 25, 2003

"[An] intriguing expose" -- Star Tribune (Minneapolis/St. Paul), Nov. 3, 2003

Product Description

Rare, romantic, and forever: The diamond industry depends on these myths to reap billions of dollars of profit. This sensational investigation explodes such fallacies and -reveals how multimillion dollar advertising campaigns create the impression of rarity and romance. It reveals, too, a very secret and unromantic world, one that is dominated and controlled by a handful of mighty corporations.

Taking us through seven decades of intrigue and manipulation that span the globe, Janine Roberts has written the most expansive and explosive expose ever on diamonds; among Roberts’ revelations:

* How De Beers hides away rich diamond deposits—and where some of these are located.

* How a long-term companion of Jackie Onassis was a CIA-linked millionaire diamond merchant tied to coups and dictators in Central Africa.

* Just how diamonds are "fixed" to make them more expensive.

* How major diamond companies cooperated with Hitler’s Germany—and how much they were paid.

* How industrial diamond supplies were artificially -restricted to the United States during World War II, severely damaging its war effort and how U.S. Intelligence came to suspect treason.

* How a major diamond deposit in Arkansas was sabotaged to stop it coming into production.

* How the White House was manipulated into buying millions of diamonds it did not need and now must sell.

* How terrorism found its way into the diamond trade, not recently but many decades ago.

* How diamonds are secretly moved by the millions around the world.

The inquiry the diamond cartel did not want and tried to stop. . . . If you have ever wondered what tales might lie behind the glitter of a diamond ring, read this account of the most international media investigation ever launched!

Product Details

• Hardcover: 352 pages
• Publisher: The Disinformation Company (September 1, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0971394296
• ISBN-13: 978-2702893197
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.3 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #616,000 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Reviewed in the Independent as "enthralling" and "brilliant!, July 7, 2004

By A Customer

A glittering account of the diamond trade
This review was in The Independent newspaper in the UK on May 22nd. It is by Boyd Tonkin. I think it one of the best.

"After Disney apparently refused to handle Michael Moore's celluloid polemic, Fahrenheit 9/11, the row over market censorship rumbled long and loud. That's America - and Hollywood - pundits over here might say. In Britain, and in the book world, we take such liberty for granted.

We can't, of course. Publishers' fear of libel suits - in particular, of "libel tourism" by foreign claimants - acts as an often-invisible brake on controversy. Mostly, it inhibits not vapid tittle-tattle about private lives but serious reportage. Take Craig Unger's House of Bush, House of Saud, acclaimed in the US for a careful exposure of the close ties between the two first families. Here, Secker & Warburg announced the book but then failed to release it. In other cases, news of the suppression of books may emerge very late, or not at all. Thanks to an intrepid US firm, an extraordinary example has just come to light.

Disinformation, a New York outfit, has issued a formidably well-researched and widely-sourced account of the global diamond trade by the Australian-based investigative journalist Janine Roberts. It strikes this lay reader as one of the most dogged and damning exposés of a near-monopolistic industry to appear in years. The greater wonder is that it has appeared at all.

Roberts first began to unearth the stories of diamond miners and traders while reporting a clash between Aboriginal people and prospectors more than 20 years ago. The project meant, above all, following the trail of De Beers. In Africa, De Beers still mines "about 45 per cent by value of the total annual global diamond production". Through its selling arm, the Diamond Trading Company, it "markets some two-thirds of global supply". In partnership with the luxury-goods group LVMH, it is currently looking for new ways "to exploit the value of its brand". The quoted phrases don't come from Roberts's enthralling and alarming history of the company's activities. They appear on the official De Beers website.

Glitter and Greed records two decades of hair-raising research in Africa, Australia and India. It explores with - if anything - a surfeit of documentation the tangled links between diamond trading, civil strife, child labour and semi-slavery. As Roberts writes, "When Princess Diana met with Angolan land-mine victims, she met victims of the proceeds of diamond sales".

Many of Roberts's discoveries entered the public domain in a two-part BBC documentary, The Diamond Empire, screened (with cuts) in 1994. By that stage, she had also completed a book. Doubleday's reader called it "sensational, well-documented and very controversial". Too much so, it seems: the investigation featured in the catalogue but never appeared. Later, Little, Brown declined to publish, hoping that Roberts could find a "less cowardly" home. Now she has.

Fully updated, Glitter and Greed traces the radical overhaul in the diamond industry's image and practice over the past five years. De Beers itself now stands in the forefront of the campaign against "conflict diamonds" sold to fund civil war. Roberts follows the refinement of the "Kimberley Process" designed to certify that the rocks on your ring come from a clean source. She decides, with a wealth of evidence, that a "Kimberley" stone offers no guarantee that the diamond "will not have been cut illegally by a child" or "mined by a miner breathing asbestos dust". As a feat of investigation, her complex but gripping book for once merits that tarnished plaudit, "brilliant". As for the performance of British publishers faced with its revelations - "lacklustre" would be kind. "

23 of 28 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Interesting... but deeply flawed, August 23, 2004

By	Bob Manson (Berkeley, CA United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I hesitate to give this book such a poor rating, because it's significantly better than the other accounts I've read and the facts need to be heard. But, following the all-too-familiar trend of the modern "factual account", it's poorly written and presents its case in a rather slapdash fashion.

While I have no doubt that the basic story (DeBeers' blatant manipulation of diamond prices, dangerous working conditions in diamond mines, and rampant trade in "blood diamonds") is accurate to some degree, it's a challenge to find anything resembling specific claims with definite proof. The book reminds me more of a "20/20 expose" than a careful, verifiable and accurate telling. Random photographs scattered throughout the text (of such fascinating subjects as outside entrances to mine workers' quarters) do little to improve this impression. Worse, there are a few "side subjects" (such as a discussion of synthetic diamonds) that contain obvious inaccuracies.

There's an interesting and vital story here, and Roberts is to be commended for presenting it in the face of a cartel with billions of dollars at stake and no compunction to "play fair". (Compare Roberts' relatively hard-hitting story to Michael Hart's ambivalent, yet very probably DeBeers-approved, "Diamond".) If the appendix describing her difficulties in getting her film aired is to be believed, there's more than a little "funny business" going on.

But... it's such a fascinating story that it doesn't need the journalistic excess that permeates this book. A sober and straightforward account would've been more convincing and ultimately more helpful.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Glitter and Greed is a definitive work on diamond intrigue, December 5, 2003

By A Customer

Being part of the family who mined Arkansas Diamonds, I saw
much detail, painstaking research, and insight about the topics. A fascinating read and honest reporting.