Tonight's Top Stop: The Dirt on Diamonds

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ONE DAY, TOM ZOELLNER had a fiancee; the next, he was left with a broken heart and a diamond ring. The enterprising reporter and author, who writes for Men's Health and the San Francisco Chronicle and who co-authored the autobiography of Rwandan hotel manager Paul Rusesabagina, took a close look at the glittering symbol of love and fell down an unsavory rabbit hole of greed, blood and secrecy. The result is "The Heartless Stone: A Journey Through the World of Diamonds, Deceit and Desire," which explores the diamond industry from mining to sales, from chemistry to military might, from London to Africa to the Arctic Circle. He will read from and discuss the book at Politics & Prose; in the meantime, he spoke with Express' Arion Berger about his enlightening research.

» EXPRESS: What drove you to write the book?
» ZOELLNER: The best analogy is probably "Fast Food Nation." The diamond is a fairly common object in American society, but the mythology of the diamond stands in stark contrast to what diamonds actually are, and there's often a dismal backstory to these.

A legacy of child labor in the diamond business lives on in India. A lot of the diamond miners particularly in Africa live very hardscrabble lives and they're getting enormously ripped off. Also, in some of the African nations, there are regions in which the rule of law is, you know, a rumor, and finding a diamond if you're a miner can be quite dangerous.

» EXPRESS: Everyone vaguely knows that diamond mining is dangerous and exploitative, but we don't know exactly how. Can you tell us?
» ZOELLNER:I don't want to paint too singular a picture — diamonds are mined in all kinds of circumstances from the highly regulated and highly ethical down to the horrible, bloody way they're mined in unstable African nations. They can be military targets; they can be great ways to finance an uprising. Diamonds can be mined by children with rifles on their backs. These are the same items that can wind up in the American retail market under the glass.

» EXPRESS: But we don't have the real story on any product, really.
» ZOELLNER: That's correct. It's true of almost every consumer product. It's not as if we can have psychic powers and know where the gas in our tank came from, where the clothes we're wearing were made. But almost no consumer product is romanticized as thoroughly and as ... ridiculously, almost, as diamonds are.

EXPRESS: Do you see things changing?
ZOELLNER: Well, because there's simply no better way to pour a lot of money into a small space, diamonds have always been excellent tools for all kinds of criminal enterprises. The industry needs to do more.

» Politics & Prose, 5015 Connecticut Ave. NW; Thu., 7 p.m., free; 202-364-1919. (Van Ness-UDC)

Photo courtesy Goldberg McDuffie Communications