Rainey said, “Mind if I take just one more look around?”
“No,” Duncan said. “Go ahead, if it will make you feel better.”
Rainey walked into Morfett’s office and stood studying the room. He and the others had gone over the place thoroughly. But somehow he had the feeling that this was the room that held the secret of the jewels—if there were a secret.
Almost without thinking, he began to measure with his hands a small safe that sat in a bulkhead cabinet. Then he realized there was a space of about two inches between the top of the safe and the shelf of the cabinet, concealed by a strip of molding.
He pried loose the molding and discovered a package. When he opened it, he saw the sparkle of diamonds.
Rainey walked to the door and as Duncan looked up he tossed the package to him. “Here are your diamonds,” he said.
Within the next few minutes, the agents found other gems tucked into envelopes in the hiding place. And then they confronted Morfett. He shrugged. “That’s it,” he said. “That’s what you have been looking for.” He lit a cigarette as calmly as though the agents had called on him to have tea.
As John Reginald Morfett was led from the Assyria, Tom Duncan looked at his watch. It was 6:56 P.M. Four minutes later the ship began to ease away from the pier.
Morfett was sentenced to three years in prison for his role in the smuggling effort.
Within a period of three days in 1951—on January 21, 22 and 23—Customs agents and inspectors seized smuggled diamonds worth more than $1 million. A traveller from Antwerp named Elijah Whiteman was discovered carrying $300,000 worth of gems in the false bottom of a suitcase. Lesser seizures totalled $200,000. And then more than $500,000 worth of diamonds were discovered in a strange scene enacted at Idlewild airport.