World’s Largest Pearl for Sale--for $10 Million

Just in time for Christmas comes this gift idea for that special someone who has everything.

The world’s largest known pearl, a football-sized gem that weighs in at 14 pounds, will soon be going on the block in Los Angeles for $10 million.

The Pearl of Allah is being sold as part of a settlement reached between the gem’s owners and their creditors in U.S. District Court in Denver this week.

Listed in the Guiness Book of Records, the pearl comes with a history almost as rich as its price tag. An estimated 6,000 years old, the gem was reportedly found in the Philippines in 1934 by a diver who drowned while trying to retrieve it from the shell of a giant clam. Later owners said the images of Mohammed, Buddha, Confucius and Christ could be seen by gazing at its surface.

Beverly Hills jeweler Peter D. Hoffman and his former partner, Victor Barbish, purchased the gem from the estate of Wilburn Dowell Cobb for $200,000 at a San Francisco auction in 1980. “

The two men kept the grayish-white pearl until 1986, when it became entangled in a legal case between Barbish and his creditors.

One of the creditors, plaintiff Joseph Bonicelli, said the pearl looks stunning, though it might not make for the best wardrobe accessory.

“You have to understand that it’s pretty big,” said Bonicelli, a retired Colorado Springs automobile dealer and bar owner. “Some people think it kind of looks like a human brain.”

The court has given the owners a year to sell the gem, which has spent the last three years gathering dust in a Denver bank vault. Hoffman, who described the pearl as “magnificent,” said he would try to keep it if the insurance wasn’t so prohibitive.

“It really belongs in a museum or in someone’s private collection,” he said.

Hoffman expects the pearl, also known as the Pearl of Lao-tze, to sell quickly, this being the holiday season and all. But prospective buyers should beware--it supposedly carries a curse.

Legend has it that bad fortune will come to anyone who buys or sells the gem because it is supposed to be handed down from generation to generation as a gift.

Denver attorney Jim Lyons, who represented two of the plaintiffs in the case, found it somehow fitting that a cursed pearl should end up in the land of conspicuous consumption.

“The pearl and its curse go back to Los Angeles and will get lost with all the other curses in Southern California,” Lyons said.