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Pearl Jewelry - The Story of Pearl Hunters

As long as pearl jewelry have been known to people, they have been a highly sought commodity for their beauty. It's only in recent times however that the industry has taken the hunt for the perfect pearl to a whole different level. Today, the shiny orbs that we see on in display in jewelry stores have actually almost always been grown in farms.

That's a far cry from the dangerous extraction and collection methods used before the invention of modern technology. In the past, not more than 100 years ago, the only way to retrieve pearls was by diving in lakes, floods and the ocean to pick them up, one at the time. The unfortunate divers who'se job it was to do this, were often poor and lured by the relative large sums they could get. The diver would sometimes have to dive as deep as 100 feet on one single breath of air. In order to preserve air and to stay submerged the longest, the divers would hold on to heavy stones on the way down.

Naturally, this dangerous activity was reserved for the desperate or the powerless - in many cases slaves or extremely poor peasents. Today, this method is all but obsolete in most places of the world. The cheaper cultured pearls have become popular and are many times the only pearls available to the consumer.

There are however still a few isolated areas that practice this old art of pearl diving. Some of the finest natural pearl speciments come from the gulf of Bahrain. Here, divers still risk their health to retrieve what are considered the top of the crop in the world. In fact, Bahrain wants no part of the sale of cultured pearls, banned from trade. Bahrain is one of the few places on earth that does an active job in trying to preserve the natural habitat and waters from pollution.

It's an interesting story and one that continues to fascinate buyers around the world. Somehow, the beauty of the pearl grows when it's been retrieved from the depth of the ocean.

Friday, 12-Nov-2010 09:16

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Buying Pearl Jewelry Without Being Ripped Off

Buying pearl jewelry can be fun, exciting and confusing. Whether you're considering a gift of pearl jewelry for someone special or as a treat for yourself, take some time to learn the terms used in the industry. Here's some information to help you get the best quality pearl jewelry for your money, whether you're shopping in a traditional brick and mortar store or online.

Pearls

Natural or real pearls are made by oysters and other mollusks. Cultured pearls also are grown by mollusks, but with human intervention; that is, an irritant introduced into the shells causes a pearl to grow. Imitation pearls are man-made with glass, plastic, or organic materials.

Because natural pearls are very rare, most pearls used in jewelry are either cultured or imitation pearls. Cultured pearls, because they are made by oysters or mollusks, usually are more expensive than imitation pears. A cultured pearl's value is largely based on its size, usually stated in millimeters, and the quality of its nacre coating, which give it luster. Jewelers should tell your if the pearls are cultured or imitation. Some black, bronze, gold, purple, blue and orange pearls, whether natural or cultured, occur that way in nature; some, however, are dyed through various processes. Jewelers should tell you whether the colored pearls are naturally colored, dyed or irradiated.

Clams, oysters, mussels and many other mollusks with limy shells are known to produce pearls. But very few kinds yield gem pearls of jeweler's quality. The pearl is an abnormal growth of mother-of-pearl, or nacre, imbedded in the soft bodies of these shellfish. It is built up, layer upon layer, in the same way as nacre is added to the lining of the growing shell and always has the same color and luster. For example, over the country, hundreds of good-sized pearls are found each year in the oysters we eat. Unfortunately these have no commercial value regardless of whether they have been cooked or not because they are dull opaque white or purple like the shell of the parent oyster. In recent times almost all pearls of gem quality come from the oriental pearl oyster which has a bright shimmering translucent nacre.

A pearl starts growing when some irritating foreign substance such as a sand grain, bit of mud, parasite or other object becomes lodged in the shell-producing gland called the mantle. Pearls formed in the soft flesh where nacre can be added on all sides are most likely to be spherical and the most highly prized. By far the great majority are flattened or variously distorted and have little value. Size, color, luster and freedom from flaws are other essential qualities. Unlike other gems, such as diamonds, pearls have an average life of only about 50 years. In time the small amount of water in a pearl's make-up is lost and its surface cracks. Because they are mostly lime, necklaces which are worn often are injured by the acid secretions of the human skin.

Friday, 5-Nov-2010 08:54

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Buying Pearl Jewelry Without Being Ripped Off

Wednesday, 28-Oct-2009 08:37

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Detective Chief Inspector Harker urged parents

A teenager has been murdered after she apparently met her killer over the internet, police said yesterday.

The body of Ashleigh Hall, 17, from pearl jewelry Darlington, was found dumped, fully clothed in a field near a Little Chef restaurant on the outskirts of Sedgefield, Co Durham. Detective Chief Inspector Paul Harker said there was “nothing to indicate a sexual element”.

Friends said that Ashleigh, who was studying childcare at Darlington College, had met a man over the internet who claimed he was 16.

Police later arrested a homeless man, 32, on suspicion of murder after he was stopped for traffic offences on Monday night.
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The man, thought to come from the Merseyside area, was pulled over between Sedgefield and Stockton-on-Tees after a camera recognised his numberplate. He was taken to Middlesbrough police station where he asked to speak to detectives. It is understood that he later led officers to the field where the body lay.

Scientific experts and a Home Office wholesale pearl jewelry pathologist carried out examinations at the scene and the body was taken later to Darlington Memorial Hospital for post-mortem examination.

Durham police believe that Ashleigh left her home on Sunday night after contacting a man on the internet. She told her mother she was staying overnight with a friend.

Her mother had not heard from her by lunchtime on Monday and became increasingly concerned when her repeated calls to the teenager’s mobile phone went unanswered.

Danny Fisher, 17, who went to college with Ashleigh, said: “She was very outgoing and had loads of friends. She was always really popular.” Other friends paid tribute to to the “bubbly” girl who was “always smiling”.

The family were too upset to comment freshwater pearl last night.

Detective Chief Inspector Harker urged parents to be careful about their children arranging to meet strangers over the internet.

Wednesday, 28-Oct-2009 07:06

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TPG checks out of Debenhams £500m richer

TPG, the American private equity house that made its name in Britain by taking Debenhams private, sold its last remaining shares in the retailer yesterday, taking the total profit on its investment to nearly £500 million.

Traders said that TPG’s entire 9.34 per cent stake in the retailer had been bought by a single, unnamed investor, whom Debenhams’ management was scrabbling to identify yesterday.

Industry insiders said that the freshwater pearl buyer could be Och-Ziff, the American hedge fund that owns Peacocks, the retailing chain. The buyer is expected to identify itself within days to comply with stock market regulations.

TPG’s exit signals the end of an era at Debenhams. The retailer’s take-private-and-refloat came to epitomise the so-called “quick flip”, a model whereby private equity would buy listed businesses cheaply and load them with debt before refloating them a couple of years later at a huge profit.
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CVC Capital Partners, TPG’s coinvestor in the deal, sold most of its shares in June, when the debt-laden Debenhams tapped investors for cash. Neither CVC nor TPG subscribed to the retailer’s rights issue, proceeds of which were used to pay down its £970 million debt mountain.

TPG and CVC took Debenhams private for £1.7 billion in 2003, with Merrill Lynch’s private equity unit joining the consortium later. The trio made a profit of £950 million between them after two refinancings that left the company with £1.9 billion of debt by the time it was floated. Debenhams had only £100 million of debt when taken private.

It is believed that TPG received about 40 per cent of that £950 million. The private equity house added to the bonanza with a further £98 million yesterday when it sold its remaining Debenhams shares. TPG’s final profit from six years’ investment in the retailer is thought to be about £480 million.

The Debenhams buyout was led by freshwater pearl jewelry Philippe Costeletos, TPG’s co-head of European operations, a dapper banker typifying private equity’s “Masters of the Universe”. The Ivy Leagueeducated Mr Costeletos, who is fluent in five languages, is a former investment banker who lives in Kensington, West London.

The IPO was shunned by institutional investors, angry to have sold to private equity too cheaply in 2003. Private equity houses aiming to float companies they own in a predicted next round of IPOs have found it hard to counteract the “Debenhams effect”: some institutional investors believe private equity would never sell them anything worth buying. The banks that arranged Debenhams’ pre-float refinancing —HBOS, Royal Bank of Scotland, Lloyds TSB and Barclays — were left with most of its £1 billion of bank debt months after the refloat in 2006.

Neither CVC nor TPG subscribed to Debenhams’s £323 million rights issue in June. Both gave up their seats on the retailer’s board at this stage. The departure of Mr Costeletos and Jonathan Feuer, his TPG colleague, from the retailer promoted speculation that the American private equity house was preparing to sell out.

Debenhams is one of several private pearl necklace equity-backed companies to have struggled because they were laden with debt in the boom years. Lenders to Yell, the directories group, which was floated by Apax and Hicks Muse, its private equity owners, in 2004, have until 5pm today to back a debt- restructuring deal or Yell will ask the courts to push one through instead.

Wednesday, 28-Oct-2009 03:50

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I lied to escape a ban for taking hard drugs

Andre Agassi makes the sensational confession today that he lied to the tennis authorities to escape a ban for taking hard drugs.

The American, one of the finest players to grace the game, tested positive for the highly addictive drug, crystal methamphetamine, and pearl jewelry then duped the Association of Tennis Professionals into believing he had taken it by accident.

The admissions come in a soul-searching autobiography that is being serialised exclusively today and tomorrow in The Times.

The 1992 Wimbledon champion, the winner of eight grand-slam titles, also says that he has always secretly hated playing tennis and lived in fear of his bad-tempered and violent father.
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Agassi, now 39, relates how he took crystal meth — possession of which carries a maximum five-year jail sentence in the US — in 1997, when his form was falling and he was having doubts about his impending marriage to the actress, Brooke Shields.

Had the positive drugs
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test become public, the repercussions for Agassi could have been catastrophic. It remains to be seen whether repercussions will follow his confession.

In his book, Agassi recounts sitting at home with his assistant, referred to only as Slim, and being introduced to the drug. “Slim is stressed too ... He says, You want to get high with me? On what? Gack. What the hell’s gack? Crystal meth. Why do they call it gack? Because that’s the sound you make when you’re high ... Make you feel like Superman, dude.

“As if they’re coming out of someone else’s mouth wholesale pearl earrings, I hear these words: You know what? F*** it. Yeah. Let’s get high.

“Slim dumps a small pile of powder on the coffee table. He cuts it, snorts it. He cuts it again. I snort some. I ease back on the couch and consider the Rubicon I’ve just crossed.

“There is a moment of regret, followed by vast sadness. Then comes a tidal wave of euphoria that sweeps away every negative thought in my head. I’ve never felt so alive, so hopeful — and I’ve never felt such energy.

“I’m seized by a desperate desire to clean. I go tearing around my house, cleaning it from top to bottom. I dust the furniture. I scour the tub. I make the beds.”

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Sun 18-Mar-2012 23:53
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Wednesday, 28-Oct-2009 03:35

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street of Green Lanes. The incident – which left four

Kavanagh is no stranger to the lethal potential of north London's gunmen and the Turkish gangs' propensity for violence. He was the senior investigating officer in the 2002 murder of Alisan Dogan, 43, a cleaner who was caught in the crossfire and died from stab wounds when dozens of criminals staged a running battle in the busy shopping street of Green Lanes. The incident – which left four men with gunshot wounds – is thought to be connected to Turkish organised crime involving the Bombacilars.

One theory behind the surge in shootings points to the power vacuum left in the wake of Ergun's imprisonment and, three years ago, the jailing of Abdullah Baybasin, who was one of the country's most feared criminals and who ruled his £10bn heroin empire with violence and intimidation. The Turkish 48-year-old, who lived in north London, commanded a gang of foot soldiers who racketeered, imported drugs and instilled fear into London's Turkish and Kurdish pearl jewelry communities. His jailing for 22 years destabilised the gangs' natural order, creating a power struggle now filled by the dozens of young men affiliated to the Bombacilar and Tottenham Boys.

Ergun and Kavanagh agree that the structure of the new hierarchy lacks the organisation and disciplined heroin dealing of Baybasin's network and, instead, is characterised by more chaotic, gung-ho individuals preoccupied with issues of respect as much as earning riches. Ergun said: "They're only little kids who don't respect anyone. In my opinion they are just idiots who think that selling a bit of brown [heroin] and having a gun means you're a gangster."

Yet Ergun and Kavanagh disagree on one facet – drugs. The police commander believes that the supply of heroin has been replaced by cannabis dealing and extortion rackets against Turkish and Kurdish businesses.

Ergun believes that the trade in heroin, traditionally controlled in London by Turkish organised criminals, remains as rife as ever. He said: "You've got the Kurds bringing it over, 10, 15, 20 kilos at a time, and these youngsters are buying it off them and selling it on the street, and that's where the war is coming from.

"It's just a price war or the usual stepping on pearl jewelry wholesale one another's toes, poaching one another's customers. That's where all this fucking mix-up is."

In Helmand province, where British troops continue their fight against the Taliban, the latest bulletins indicate that large quantities of heroin are still leaving the area and passing through Turkish suppliers and into north London.

Steve Coates, deputy director of the Serious Organised Crime Agency (Soca) and an expert on the heroin trade for the past 20 years, confirmed that the Turkish gangs still "dominated" the heroin trade in the UK, controlling at least 50% of the country's supply.

He said the latest intelligence had pinpointed key figures in Turkey as well as the traditional Turkish crime gangs of north pearl necklace London, though he would not name the Bombacilar and the Tottenham Boys.

As Soca attempts to squeeze the heroin supply to the capital's Turkish gangs, Met officers in the Green Lanes area and Tottenham will supplement their armed patrols with visits to vulnerable shopkeepers, analysis of car numberplates and a fresh round of meetings with representatives of the Turkish and Kurdish communities.

So far, the "proactive" CO19 patrols are credited with instigating an instant drop-off in activity from the Bombacilar and Tottenham Boys. "We have got them reeling because we are showing that the levels of violence are not being tolerated," said Kavanagh.

The Met's hierarchy is watching the trials closely. Gun-related crime in London has risen year-on-year, with the number of gun crimes in September alone up from 230 last year to 300 this year, a 30% rise. It is hoped that the trials in Green Lanes, Tottenham and south of the river in Brixton, where street shootings have also spiked, will quash the trend.

But the Yard's commanders equally know that any fatal error, any accidental shooting from a firearms unit which is still tarnished with the death of Jean Charles de Menezes at Stockwell tube station in 2005, means that the experiment will be over.

Wednesday, 28-Oct-2009 03:21

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In particular, the criminal landscape within a narrow two-mile band of north London, between the freshwater pearl beads Green Lanes area of Haringey and Clapton to the east, had reached a critical stage. A ferocious turf war between Bombacilar and the Tottenham Boys was spiralling out of control; in the period immediately before Duzgun's death the gangs were involved in a major shooting every week.

Endemic extortion, intimidation and thuggish protection rackets were increasingly administered to Haringey's large Turkish and Kurdish communities as the turf war took hold. Gang members appeared to be acting with impunity, bragging to local Turkish newspapers that they were only dealing a bit of cannabis and harming no one. But underworld sources revealed the gangs had ready access to an arsenal of firearms. And neither side was shy about using loose pearl them. Intelligence indicated it was only a matter of time before more innocent bystanders were killed.

Kavanagh, the officer in charge of policing the area, said: "We have had a mother evacuated when they burnt out a store, murders, innocent people being shot and good honest shopkeepers bullied and extorted."

He said the wives of extorted shopkeepers and the girlfriends of gangsters had, for months, pleaded with him to do something; anything to break the cycle of violence. Skirmishes between the Bombacilar and Tottenham Boys have seen 11 major shootings since August, all confined to the slender north London corridor.

Police raids seized three loaded pistols, a sawn-off shotgun and a converted firearm connected to the Bombacilar and Tottenham Boys. Intelligence indicated that some of the weapons originated from eastern Europe, and although the area was "not flooded with firearms" it was the gangs' willingness to shoot first, think later, that worried Kavanagh.

Suleyman Ergun, formerly one of Britain's most prominent Turkish criminals, who at the age of 21 became the world's third-biggest heroin dealer before being jailed for 14 years, told the Observer how easy it was for gangs to obtain guns. He said the majority of firearms arrived from Germany and Belgium, and there were even AK-47s (Kalashnikovs) from Afghanistan, the traditional source of heroin for Turkish traffickers.

"Firearms are still coming over with the heroin to north London, it's what we used to do as well," said Ergun. He added that the current price for an unused pistol in north London was £800-£900, while a brand-new submachine gun would cost £1,000-£1,500. Replica guns such as the Olympic BBM 9mm revolver could also be bought for £85 on the high street and converted by criminals to fire live ammunition.

What added to the decision to use armed patrols was the intelligence that both Turkish groups had forged alliances with some of London's most notorious black gangs, all of whom held a long-standing reputation for violence and the casual use of firearms.

Kavanagh believes that the unprecedented union suggests that the long-standing black gangs of Hackney had joined forces with the Turkish crews to widen their drugs markets and broaden their influence. "The expansion is to do with drugs and violence and kudos and what opportunities they have to freshwater pearl beads support each other. Those bonds are quite chaotic relationships, but involve well-known Hackney gangs, the usual suspects," he said.

So far detectives have been able to link three murders since March to the mounting friction between the Bombacilar and Tottenham Boys, but the involvement of the black crews, the Yardies and crack dealers, usually investigated under Operation Trident, meant that the threat and killing potential of the Turkish gangs had intensified.

Senior officers were aware the decision to send routine armed patrols on to British streets would lead to accusations of heavy-handed American-style policing, but they also knew that what was happening in one small area had increased gun crime in London by 17% and the city was being blighted.

As commanders weighed up the advantages against the chorus of opprobrium such a move would inevitably attract, the decision was made to ask one of Scotland Yard's most experienced homicide detectives to establish whether more murders were linked to the arrival of the "super-gangs".

Detective Superintendent John Sweeney of the Yard's specialist crime directorate, known for leading the Met's review into the death of cricket coach Bob Woolmer, is examining whether other shootings in the capital can be linked to the Bombacilar and Tottenham Boys.

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Fri 20-Apr-2012 02:08
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