Marc Weill

Gem Dandy: Town Man Finds Merit In Minerals

April 20, 2006
by Keach Hagey

Four years ago, Greenwich resident Marc Weill thought he had acquired one of the largest and rarest examples of tourmaline in the world for his fledgling mineral collection.

Shafts of the precious blue-green gem shot more than a foot out of white and purple crystals at gravity-defying angles, lending the whole 2-foot-long specimen such a distinctly nautical air that he nicknamed it "The Ship." The shape was unforgettable, and the size unlikely to be topped, he thought.

Then came the call from the mine in Brazil.

"They call us first when they have a find," he said. "They said, 'Look, we
have something spectacular.' So my partner hopped on the first flight to Brazil. You have to be ready to pick up and go anywhere in the world on a moment's notice."

When Weill's partner, mineral dealer Daniel Trinchillo, a 32-year-old Queens resident who claims to have started his trade at the age of 8, arrived, he was not disappointed.

"I had never seen anything like it in my life," Trinchillo said. "I saw it and immediately said, 'This is going to be one of the world's finest specimens ever, and you should think about buying it.' " He spent a week negotiating the price, which he would reveal only as having six figures.

When he brought the rock back to Weill's home, located in backcountry Greenwich next door to that of his father, former Citigroup chairman Sanford Weill, its fan-shaped shafts towered over that of its ship-shaped sister.

"He had outdone himself," said Bella Pasquino, Weill's personal assistant, to whom falls the daunting task of cataloging the constantly fluctuating list of precious rocks.

Today, the two tourmalines sit as twin centerpieces in Weill's approximately 700-piece collection of minerals, gems and fossils. Although started only five years ago, it is quickly becoming known among mineral enthusiasts as one of the finest collections in the world.

"I view it as nature's artwork," Weill said. "It's like nothing that we could ever duplicate. Some people collect paintings, I collect nature's paintings."

For Weill, who heads the 2-year-old Greenwich-based money management and business development firm City Light Capital, the collection is partly a way of living out a boyhood dream. He started collecting rocks when he was 10, and, with the help of a friend from Long Island, even learned to cut them.

"I was thinking about becoming a geology major, which I didn't do," he said. "I went into business and finance, so that was the end of that."

The passion lay dormant until about five years ago, when he was building a swimming pool and the pool builder suggested that he get some minerals to add to the project. He discovered that his son also had an interest in the hobby.

"He liked rocks," Weill said of his son, now 13. "That rekindled my interest in collecting minerals."

A man of frenetic energy who, by his own admission, rarely does things halfway, Weill plunged into collecting with both feet. He started buying over the Internet, but quickly became concerned about the retail prices he was paying.

So he went to the experts at Astro Gallery of Gems on New York City's Madison Avenue, where three generations of Tanjeloffs have run one of the country's premier mineral showrooms since 1951. Soon, the company's president, Dennis Tanjeloff, became both a trusted dealer and a friend, who gave Weill the right of first refusal every time he ran across something special.

Although Tanjelloff, 38, has been following his father and grandfather on mineral gathering missions since he was four years old, the awe in his voice was audible when he talks about Weill's collection.

"He has some of the finest examples of certain minerals available in the marketplace outside of museums," Tanjelloff said. "His tourmalines and bournenites - in 300 years of mining, these are some of the finest examples ever to be pulled out of the ground. In mineralogy, this is like pulling a new Van Gogh out of the ground that nobody has every heard of."

Although it could easily be held in one hand, Weill's prize bournenite - a chrome crystal, vaguely resembling a giant computer chip, recently found in a Chinese mine - is so many times larger than anything that has ever been found before that it was featured on the cover of The Mineralogical Record magazine last fall.

Weill said he is able to get these highly prized "flukes of nature," as he calls them, often because he gets there first and can pay for things immediately. "Since I could pay cash, people like to deal with me," he said.

Most come from other people's collections, and few have ever been on public display, he said. Occasionally, he gets one right out of the mine like the giant tourmaline.

The result is a collection of dazzling colors and incredible variety: Brilliant red rhordocrosite from Colorado; a giant, perfect crystal of pale purple kunzite; highly polished black and white concentric circles of bird's eye agate; eerie curls of ram's horn calcites; and even some cryptonite-green toubenite that is radioactive.

When describing them, Weill rattles off geological facts like a mad scientist, and his passion for both the minerals themselves and the processes that made them is contagious.

"Some of these minerals could have been made in two minutes," he said. "Others took hundreds of years."

In the long term, he hopes to be able to share this knowledge and collection with children. In the short term, he is working on a book.

Of course, deciding exactly what might go into such a book is difficult, as he is constantly trading, buying and selling to improve his collection.

"It's always a work in progress," he said.

There's one tourmaline he won't sell, however, and it's not either of his two centerpieces. Rather, its a little hunk of the stuff he found during Boy Scout camp outing, during his first career as a mineral collector.