Diamonds in the news: Magazine featuring diamond hoax hits stands.
Excerpt:
A national magazine featuring a hoax corroborated by a former Hardin County resident is on newsstands.
The June issue of Smithsonian spotlights the Great Diamond Hoax of 1872 in an eight-page spread. The 5,000-word article details how Philip Arnold, the architect of a diamond fraud, bilked some of the richest men in America at the time out of a fortune.
During the four months of the fraud and the eventual fallout, the event generated coverage by The New York Times and The Times of London, as well as nearly every major news-paper along the West Coast.
Arnold, a Mexican War veteran from Elizabethtown, and his cousin, John Slack, initiated a diamond craze along the Wyoming-Colorado border after they reported finding a diamond mine and supplied as proof a bag filled with diamonds, rubies and other precious stones. Eventually, word spread to some of the richest men in the country that the two "prospectors" had found diamonds. With venture capital the investors provided, Arnold and Slack secretly set off to Europe, where they purchased even more cheap stones to salt their "find."
Posted by GilbertZ at 04:46 PM
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