$3 Million PER Pound : Artifacts: The world’s largest pearl arrives in Studio City.

The famed Pearl of Allah arrived in Los Angeles Thursday, not by flying carpet or atop a white steed, but in an armored truck, under a firestorm of flashing cameras.

The 14-pound convoluted pearl looks rather like a petrified white brain and appeared better suited to a home in formaldehyde than on satin. But it retained an aura of romance as it was installed in a Studio City vault and briefly exhibited for photographers from around the world.

“I am very proudly a part of this priceless and remarkable artifact,” co-owner Peter Hoffman said as he placed the pearl on a display stand draped in black velvet and gold lame. “It has a wonderful history and some remarkable legends to it.”

Considered the world’s largest pearl, its flamboyant arrival in the San Fernando Valley marked the latest turn in a fanciful, 2,500-year history and the end of a nine-year legal battle as twisted as its hard, white furrows.

Hoffman said the pearl had been appraised at $42 million by the San Francisco Gem Laboratory.

It is destined for sale, possibly to a foreign collector, Hoffman said. The proceeds will settle a number of debts before Hoffman and his partners see any profit, according to Matthew I. Berger, a Beverly Hills attorney who represents one of the creditors with a claim on the pearl’s sale proceeds.

Hoffman, a second-generation jeweler who grew up in West Los Angeles, declined to discuss the pearl’s legal history. But Berger said his client, the Trans-Exchange Corp. of Texas, filed suit in 1981 in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles after Hoffman and a partner failed to pay off a $200,000 promissory note.

The loan covered the purchase price of the pearl in 1980 from the estate of Wilburn Dowell Cobb, a San Francisco archeologist who obtained it in the 1930s and met Hoffman in 1977, three years before his death.

After Trans-Exchange Corp. won a judgment for repayment in the mid-1980s and sought assets to seize, the pearl could not be found, Berger said. It was finally located in Colorado Springs, Colo., where Hoffman’s partner in the pearl’s purchase had used it as collateral for another loan, Berger said.

Hoffman had it brought to Los Angeles so that he could supervise its sale.

Hoffman--who owns a third of the pearl and must see it sold to cover the debts he and his partners owe in its purchase--said he would like it bought by a private collector who will ensure its public display.

“It’s like a great masterpiece, like a Van Gogh,” Hoffman said earlier this week, adding that the pearl had changed him.

“It has made me a very spiritual person,” Hoffman said. “Everything I do I look at from a spiritual point of view instead of from a material point of view.”

Wrapped in layers of plastic foam and bubbles, the pearl rolled into Los Angeles from Denver Thursday morning. About two dozen photographers waited while the Loomis Armored Inc. truck positioned itself in front of American Vault’s main entrance off Laurel Canyon Boulevard.

According to legend, the ancient Chinese philosopher Lao-Tzu had his nephew implant a small amulet depicting the faces of Buddha, Confucius and himself inside a clam. His hope, according to a press release, was that the resulting pearl would be “transplanted into ever-larger clams” and “handed down from generation to generation” as “an enduring symbol of peaceful coexistence between all peoples.”

According to this legend, the philosopher’s descendants settled in the Philippines, where the pearl was reimplanted in a giant tridacna clam offshore. It was lost during a Ming Dynasty-era typhoon but rediscovered in 1934 by a Philippine diver, who drowned in the process.

The Muslim chief who obtained the pearl thought it looked like the turbaned head of Mohammed and proclaimed it the Pearl of Allah. A few years later, Cobb received the pearl as a gift after he saved the chief’s malaria-stricken son with modern medicine, Cobb later told reporters.

As cameras clicked Thursday, Hoffman pointed out what he said were likenesses of the faces of Lao-Tzu toward the bottom, Buddha in the center, and Confucius on the left of the great pearl.

Then the Pearl of Allah was whisked away to the vault, where a cast was to be made for replicas that will be shown to prospective buyers.