Audio By Carbonatix
Two years ago today, just after 2 a.m., three men smashed through the glass doors of Henryk Kostman Fine Jewelry in a nine-story building on Turtle Creek Boulevard. A security guard was patrolling the grounds at the time, but was unable to stop the thieves from making off with nearly half a million dollars worth of gold and platinum watches, rings, bracelets, necklaces and loose diamonds. The break-in was caught on video, but two years on, no arrests have been made and the jewelry is still missing.
Most of it is still missing, that is. Kostman, a longtime Dallas jeweler, has located two of the items: a six-carat, emerald-cut diamond ring worth $130,000 and a 4.51-carat, princess-cut diamond ring worth $45,000. The problem is, they’re in Hong Kong.
Kostman knows this because, several years before, he had sent the diamonds to the Gemological Institute of America, the world’s go-to place for gem grading, for assessment. After the theft, he alerted the GIA to be on the lookout for the jewelry. On June 27, a man named Seyed Ahamed, who runs a Kowloon-based jewelry trader, brought some gems to GIA’s Hong Kong office to be graded. They were identical.
GIA notified Kostman, who yesterday filed a lawsuit in Dallas County asking for a temporary restraining order requiring GIA to keep the diamonds and, ultimately, give them back. Kostman declined to comment.
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