Stone of Kings

by Gerard Helferich

  At this point, Mary Lou and Jay Ridinger were doing little prospecting themselves. Though they reviewed geological maps and suggested areas to search, most of the on-the-ground work was done by their staff geologist, Jaime Godoy, along with local pickers and the young Jake Ridinger. The lanky, towheaded Jake had been accompanying his parents on prospecting trips since the age of five, and by the time he was eleven or twelve, he’d been making overnight forays into the mountains with the Ridingers’ collectors, in what his mother calls “a jade initiation rite.” Eighteen years old and grown to six foot seven, Jake went off to college in the States. But on school vacations, wearing a lucky piece of jade around his neck, he would drive himself up the teeming Atlantic Highway, meet a local guide or prospector, then hike into the searing backcountry. Sometimes, they’d venture thirty or forty miles from the nearest road, spending four or five days, picking wild plants and shooting game to supplement their rations. What drew the young Ridinger to prospecting? Partly it was his love for the outdoors, and partly a desire to contribute to the family business. On one of his excursions, Jake Ridinger came across a boulder with a vein of the rarest jade of all, imperial green. Another time, he found some blue jade on one of the family’s license sites, but only scraps—the lion’s share had already been broken up and carried off by poachers.

  A few hours’ hike from the poached blue jade, a farmer led Jake to a previously unreported archaeological site. With a gorgeous hilltop setting, it consisted of a series of mounds whose centers had been dug out by looters. There were also two long, parallel mounds that may have been a ball court, and nearby were caves with ancient inscriptions. Based on that discovery, a friend of the family sponsored Jake for membership in the Explorers Club, the New York organization whose mission is to study “unknown or little known destinations or phenomena in order to gain knowledge for human kind,” and whose three-thousand-name membership roll includes Edmund Hillary, Robert Peary, Roald Amundsen, and Neil Armstrong. Ridinger’s find was also reported to Guatemala’s Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, which added it to its registry of thousands of sites awaiting excavation. The Instituto’s listing conferred legal protection, though the place’s remoteness makes it impossible to defend against more poaching.

  In 1999, the Ridingers received some favorable publicity, when Mary Lou played a prominent role in a Discovery Channel special called The Mysteries of Jade, focused on the scourge of looting. In March of that same year, Bill Clinton visited Guatemala and spent a couple of hours at the flagship store in Antigua, chatting with Jay Ridinger and their employees (Mary Lou was out of the country). For Hillary, he bought a green necklace, and for himself a carved frog. For Chelsea, he designed a necklace of lavender jade; perhaps trying to send a message to his White House staff, he bought them bags of strong Guatemalan coffee. The visit came a year after the Monica Lewinsky scandal had broken and just a month after the Senate had voted to acquit Clinton on impeachment charges. Jay Ridinger took the opportunity to present the president with a long, pointed piece of jade—a reproduction of the penis perforators that Olmec and Maya kings had used to sacrifice their blood to the gods. By then, having survived the scandal, Clinton could laugh at the gesture.

  But the Ridingers still faced challenges. The greatest remained educating prospective buyers about Guatemalan jade and its three-thousand-year history. Also, being dependent on tourism, their business was periodically buffeted by world events—recessions, terror attacks, hurricanes, anything that kept people at home. Poaching was another perennial problem.

  The mining laws had changed since the Ridingers had begun their prospecting. Back then, any minerals found on private land, including jadeite, were the property of the landowner. Now all minerals, even those on private property, belonged to the state. So the Ridingers no longer had to buy or even rent land in order to mine its jade. When they discovered a deposit, they would substantiate the claim by filing assays and sometimes escorting a mining inspector to the site. Then the federal government would issue them an exclusive license to collect jade within a defined area, perhaps several square miles, in exchange for an annual fee and a royalty (based on the type and quantity of stone extracted), which would be shared with the municipality where the mine was located. By law, the landowner received nothing. However, the Ridingers signed contracts with the proprietors, agreeing to compensate them for any jade the campesinos collected. Jerry Leech had also secured government licenses for his quarries, but less scrupulous merchants were dispensing with the formalities and acquiring jade on the black market.

  Though the Ridingers continued to guard the location of their mines, they resolved never to post armed lookouts to prevent campesinos from pilfering their jade. For one thing, the amount of stone lost that way was minimal. For another, the Ridingers knew that the value of jade lay not so much in the raw material as in its working—the sawing and carving and grinding and polishing that turned it from a rock into a thing of beauty.

  But large-scale commercial poaching was another matter. Now that lavender and other uncommon colors had been found in the Motagua, Asian dealers took a new interest in Guatemalan jade, with Chinese poachers becoming particularly aggressive. A Chinese group invaded one of the Ridingers’ sites with earth movers, dynamite, and guns to intimidate the locals. But the Ridingers appealed to the Department of Mining, which expelled the invaders. So, whereas they had once feared that corrupt officials would impose themselves as silent partners, they now enjoyed the government’s protection. At least to a point: Sometimes the foreign poachers simply bribed officials and exported illicit stone by the containerful.

  Besides poaching, the Ridingers had to deal with even more brazen forms of theft. In July 1993, there was an armed robbery of their shop in the upscale Hotel Camino Real near Tikal, in the Petén, a part of Guatemala known for drug trafficking and violence and often compared to the American Wild West. It was their second robbery from the store. A year earlier, bandits had crept in at night, grabbed whatever they could carry, and fled. The second time, they also entered in the early morning, but with guns drawn; they fired at hotel security guards, disabled the shop’s alarm system, smashed display cases, and stole every piece of jade in the store, some sixty thousand dollars’ worth. Then they vanished into the forest. The police made no headway in the case, and when the Ridingers’ manager in the Petén, a strapping retired Army first sergeant named John Mann, tried to investigate, it was suggested that he stop asking so many questions if he cared for his own safety.

  Two months later, Mary Lou Ridinger happened to be in the Petén at the invitation of two nonprofit groups, Pro Petén and Conservation International. The organizations were sponsoring a project in which carvers from Honduras would teach Guatemalans how to knap arrowheads and carve bone to sell to tourists at nearby Tikal. The nonprofits had courtesy visas to enter Belize for the day to collect flint that the artisans-to-be would use for raw material. And so Mary Lou Ridinger, two members of Conservation International, and a man named Chico, a talented carver who had worked for the Ridingers for years, left Guatemala in their pickup truck at six o’clock in the morning.

  In 1991, Guatemala had finally recognized Belizean independence, though the border between the two countries was still unratified (as it is even today). But Ridinger’s group showed their visas and crossed into Belize without problem. They easily located the flint, following a geological map that Mary Lou Ridinger had brought along. By one o’clock, they’d loaded the stone into the pickup and were headed back to Guatemala.

  About five miles from the border, they decided to stop for lunch at a roadside restaurant. Sitting at their table and chatting with the owner’s wife, they asked about the local craft of slate carving, in which flat slabs were incised with bas-relief figures and landscapes. As a matter of fact, the woman said, she had some slate carvings in the shop next door, and after they ate, she’d be happy to open it for them.

  When she
entered the store, Mary Lou Ridinger was dumbfounded: Not only were slate carvings on display—but so were the jade masks, plaques, and jewelry that had been stolen from her shop near Tikal. Chico also recognized the merchandise instantly, since he’d carved much of it himself. The only things missing were small items—earrings, pendants, and key chains.

  Ridinger confronted the woman, who called in her husband. The robbery was unfortunate, the man said, but that had happened in Guatemala, not Belize, and he and his wife weren’t at liberty to say where they’d gotten the pieces. Ridinger offered to pay a reward and to deliver other jades for them to sell. Then, when the couple still protested, she began scooping up the merchandise, talking all the while. “Thank you so much for returning our jade. This is really such a wonderful gesture on your part. I’m going to make sure you receive recognition for what noble people you are.” Meanwhile, under her breath she was saying, “Pack it up, Chico. Get it on the truck.” The wife started sobbing. The thieves had left the jade on consignment, she said, and they would kill them when they found it missing. “You can’t do this,” she pleaded. “Think of our children.” But Mary Lou and Chico kept collecting the jade, while the members of Conservation International looked on with mouths agape.

  They carted every piece to the pickup, dropped it in the open bed, and jumped into the cab. “Drive!” Mary Lou ordered. They sped toward the frontier, watching their rear view mirrors. But no one followed, and when they reached the border and showed their courtesy visas, the Guatemalan guards didn’t so much as glance in the back of the truck.

  The next day, John Mann went to the restaurant/gift shop to make good on his boss’s promise. Not long after, he heard of two men arrested for car theft in Flores, in the Petén. Rumor was that the car was full of small jades—the key chains, earrings, and other merchandise that Mary Lou Ridinger hadn’t recovered. But when Mann went to see the local police chief, he was informed that no jade had been mentioned in the arrest report—most likely, Mann suggested, because the officers had taken the items for themselves. In the end, the Ridingers recovered all of their merchandise except for about two thousand dollars’ worth. But they never discovered what punishment, if any, was meted out to the bandits and the corrupt policemen. And they never learned whether the thieves took their revenge on the owners of the roadside gift shop.

  Over the years, the Ridingers’ relationship with the archaeological community had warmed. Though some academics were still skeptical of them as “entrepreneurs,” most were now satisfied that the couple weren’t selling forgeries or looted antiquities. The thaw had begun as far back as the Mesoamerican Jade Project, which the Ridingers had provided with many of its geological samples. Around that same time, when the first meeting of Maya epigraphers was held in Guatemala, the Ridingers had invited several of the scholars to tour the jade factory.

  Among the group was Linda Schele, the doyenne of Mayan epigraphers, who’d played a crucial role in reconstructing the royal lineage of Palenque, working from the glyphs that Alberto Ruz had discovered on the sarcophagus of Pakal the Great. In the Ridingers’ shop, Schele mentioned that she’d always wanted to learn to carve jade. Mary Lou Ridinger had always wanted to learn to read Maya glyphs, and she suggested that they exchange lessons. And so began a warm friendship between the academic and the entrepreneur. When Schele died of pancreatic cancer in 1998, at the age of fifty-five, the Ridingers dedicated a corner of their in-store museum, depicting Maya cosmology, in her honor. Included in the display was one of the last photos ever taken of Schele, in which she’s holding one of her pieces of carved jade, her putative passport to immortality.

  An event in 2001 further raised the Ridingers’ standing among archaeologists. Mary Lou was in the shop in Antigua when a Guatemalan woman came in offering to sell a small, crudely carved greenstone mask. Ridinger was on her way to lunch, but when she glanced at the mask, she thought she recognized it as one that had been stolen from a museum at La Democracia, on Guatemala’s Pacific Coast.

  She recalled that the mask had been excavated at Monte Alto, a Preclassic site also on the Pacific. In fact, Marian Hatch, the archaeologist who’d found it, lived in Antigua, a couple of blocks away. Ridinger called Hatch to confirm the identification before contacting the police, though even as she dialed, she was certain her friend would be in Guatemala City at La Universidad del Valle, where she was chair of the archaeology department. But Hatch answered the phone and agreed to come right over.

  Ridinger took the mask into the store’s office/library, while the woman waited in the patio outside. Marian Hatch arrived and immediately identified it. On Hatch’s advice, Ridinger called not the local police but the Instituto de Antropología e Historia, which said it would dispatch some men from the capital, about an hour away. To stall for time, Ridinger began peppering the woman with questions.

  “Where do you think the mask is from?”

  “The south coast.”

  “Do you think it’s old?”

  “Oh yes, it’s Preclassic.”

  “What do you think it’s worth?”

  “I want thirty-five thousand American dollars for it,” the woman said, though Ridinger figured the mask was worth millions.

  Time was passing, and the authorities still hadn’t arrived. Ridinger and Hatch were wondering how much longer they could stall. Finally, Mary Lou Ridinger confronted the woman. “Look, we know the mask is stolen. The police are on the way. So we’ll give you a choice. You can either leave it here and walk out the door, or you can wait for the authorities.”

  The woman answered that she’d have to consult her husband, who was waiting in a car outside. But as she walked out the front door, the officials finally arrived. The husband sped off, and the woman was arrested. The story made national news, and Mary Lou Ridinger testified at the trial. “What were you thinking?” her friends asked her. “This is Guatemala. There will be reprisals. They could kill you.” By this time there were armed guards posted at the store, and for the next week they did report suspicious cars cruising in front. But no one ever tried to exact revenge. As for the mask, it didn’t go back to La Democracia but was taken for safekeeping to the Museo Nacional de Arqueología y Etnología in Guatemala City.

  The Guatemalan jade business has come a long way since Mary Lou Ridinger’s excited arrival in 1974, and it’s now possible to buy jade jewelry in dozens of shops throughout the country. The Ridingers are the industry’s acknowledged founders, and they, along with associate-turned-competitor Jerry Leech, are the leading purveyors of the stone in Central America. Even so, production is still relatively small, and Mary Lou Ridinger is adamant that it remain “non-invasive and ecologically sustainable.”

  This is in contrast to what has reportedly happened in Burma (or Myanmar, the name conferred by its military dictators in 1989), where jade is mined on a large commercial scale, in a process that has proven destructive not only of the environment but of human lives. In their powerful book Stone of Heaven: Unearthing the Secret History of Imperial Green Jade, Adrian Levy and Cathy Scott-Clark, two British investigative journalists who managed to get access to the Hpakant mines in northern Burma, report how impoverished peasants are recruited with promises of easy money. But at the huge quarries, which are ringed by military checkpoints, they are forced to toil fifteen-hour shifts and to live in overcrowded, filthy conditions. Workers are also systematically cheated of their pay, and when they have lost all hope of reuniting with their families, they are offered, in lieu of wages, a potent form of heroin direct from Burma’s Golden Triangle. And after their early death from malnutrition, malaria, overdoses, and AIDS, they are replaced by the next crop of naïve arrivals.

  In Guatemala, Mary Lou Ridinger’s business benefits from the limited production that she advocates, which discourages new competitors and helps prevent a glut of jade on the market. It’s not idealism or self-restraint that keeps the industry small, but the weak
worldwide market for the less-salable Guatemalan stone. So the same fact of entrepreneurial life that has bedeviled the Ridingers for years now also helps them maintain their position as market leader.

  As she approaches her fourth decade in Guatemala, Mary Lou Ridinger, the ex-archaeologist, is still very much the “entrepreneur.” Does she ever wonder how things might have gone if she’d pursued her original career instead of embracing Jay Ridinger’s more commercial vision? “No,” she answers immediately, “never.” Hers has been “a life of magic,” blessed with “the joy of adventure.”

  Robert Leslie, perhaps more than anyone the modern “discoverer” of jade in Guatemala, left the country more than fifty years ago, but when he returned on vacations, he would often stop by the Ridingers’. On one of these visits, he told Mary Lou that if he were the Christopher Columbus of Guatemalan jade, then she and Jay were the Hernán Cortés. Like Columbus, he said, he’d made his breakthrough, then sailed away, leaving it to the Ridingers to stay on and revive an art that had been forgotten for nearly five centuries.

  Mary Lou Ridinger is amused by the comparison to the conqueror of the Aztecs. But she says it’s precisely this idea that gives her the greatest satisfaction—not just that she and Jay located more jade sources than anyone else, but that they returned jade carving to its homeland. Part of that satisfaction lies in the employment they’ve given to hundreds of Guatemalans, from pickers to carvers to salespeople. But even more fulfilling is the impact she believes that jade has had on national pride. Though it was a vital part of Guatemala’s history, jade had been lost so thoroughly that people doubted its existence. With its restoration, she believes, “every Guatemalan has something of world-class value that belongs to Guatemala and to their heritage.” Apparently President Álvaro Colom concurred: On his inauguration in 2008, he ordered forty reproduction jade masks from the Ridingers to present to visiting heads of state.