From VICE, June 9:
This is the previously unreported inside story of how the former Prime Minister of Qatar became the victim of one of the world’s biggest – and weirdest – jewellery heists.
In early December last year, famed auction house Christie’s was forced to cancel bidding on a large, flawless, pink diamond predicted to sell for as much as $35 million. The rock, the FBI told the auction house, had been stolen from a famous Middle East powerbroker by a Florida-based psychic in a shocking scheme involving a personal assistant, online spiritual counselling, FedEx, and almost $100 million in jewellery in need of an “aura cleanse.”
A few weeks earlier, on November 22, the FBI had arrested John Lee, a resident of Davenport, Florida and Paramus, New Jersey, on charges of mail and wire fraud as well as interstate transport of stolen goods after he was linked to the plot by a globe-spanning investigation.
By the time of his arrest – first reported by Court Watch based on the arrest warrant – Lee had been the subject of a months-long manhunt by both international law enforcement and teams of private detectives in Europe, the UK, the US and Persian Gulf, according to investigators, European law enforcement officials and multiple sources in the secretive diamond industry who spoke to VICE News. Almost everyone we spoke to for this story did so only on the condition of anonymity, because either they were not authorised to discuss the case or feared legal or financial reprisals.
Outside of public filings of an arrest warrant and a related civil lawsuit, and the withdrawal of the stolen gem by an embarrassed Christie’s, the case has received little media attention. That was by design, according to multiple people involved, because the victim of the jewellery theft was Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim bin Jaber Al Thani, the former prime minister of Qatar, and one of the Middle East’s richest and most politically-connected geopolitical insiders. Thani, with an estimated $2 billion fortune and a long list of powerful friends, has the money and influence to keep his name out of the case, according to a former FBI agent turned private investigator in New York.....
