The gem traders of West 47th Street maintain a timeless world
Just before 9 a.m., a dusty yellow bus pulls up to a corner in midtown Manhattan and lets out a dozen black-coated, bearded Hasidic Jews from Brooklyn. Others, similarly dressed, come pouring out of the subway entrance. Swiftly, the narrow, dirty street begins its daily transformation. Pale hands splay rainbows of gems across velvet cloths in store windows, magically making each an entrance to Ali Baba's cave. This is West 47th Street, a tiny world of its own that handles about half of the diamonds entering the U.S. Here brokers play middleman between American buyers and the supplying De Beers syndicate in London, and the deals amount to more than $2.5 billion worth of rare gems a year.
No one is sure of the exact figure because of the legendary secretiveness of the diamond trade. But business is obviously booming. In the past five years, prices have quintupled, and the working population of the street has more than doubled, reaching about 15,000.
Inevitably, such growth in an area dealing in such a precious commodity is accompanied by friction and occasional sparks of violence. Earlier this month, Martin Paretsky, 71, left the street with $500,000 in diamonds, heading for a meeting at the nearby Hilton Hotel. No trace of him has been found. Two days later, Satya Narian Gupta, 27, one of the handful of Indian dealers on the street, left his office with $300,000 worth of stones. Three days later, his body was found bound and strangled in Pennsylvania's Pocono Mountains. There have been no arrests in the case. The well-publicized incidents have made the merchants even more tight-lipped than usual. They fear that any talk with outsiders could lead only to greater vulnerability.
The insularity of West 47th Street stems from the homogeneity of the diamond dealers. The vast majority are Jewish. Until the end of World War II, there were only a couple of diamond shops in the 47th Street area. Then came the influx of survivors from the Nazi Holocaust, many bearing the tattoos of their concentration camps. The newcomers entered a business that had been a specialty of Jews since the Middle Ages, when the trade was one of the few professions that did not come under the purview of a tightly controlled guild. Diamonds were also perfect wares for a persecuted and wandering people who had to carry their means of livelihood with them.
Almost a third of the workers on 47th Street are Hasidic Jews, a Yiddish-speaking, fundamentalist sect. The men let their beards and forelocks grow, as admonished by the Old Testament book of Leviticus. Deeply religious, the Hasidim from Brooklyn travel in a bus that is divided down the aisle by a curtain, segregating men and women for prayer sessions on the way to work.
The high value the Hasidim place on personal honor sets the tone for the street, where packets of diamonds worth hundreds of thousands of dollars are traded by verbal agreements. Says one dealer: "If I broke my word in a deal, the word would be passed, and I would be dead in the business. No one would talk to me. I would be shunned."