Murdering for diamonds

It was at Freetown Airport, which even before the civil war could be reached only with some difficulty, that I learnt that there was such a product as Johnny Walker Blue Label, about ten times as expensive as the Black Label variety. Since Sierra Leone was conspicuously impoverished and broken-down, I would have guessed from the offer for sale of this ostentatiously expensive luxury (if I hadn’t already known it by other experiences) that the country was in the hands of a rapacious and vulgar elite.