When Basart Marina was 18 years old, his whole world was crashing down.

It was the spring of 1999, and Yugoslavia was violently breaking apart.

Like millions of others, Marina fled. He came to America with little to his name

and found work at a restaurant. And there, under the fluorescent lights of the prep station,

he encountered a pungent little delicacy that would change his life. In this restaurant, we started serving truffles.

So I'm like, why would people pay each slice $20?

This makes no sense.

You can buy three sandwiches with that money.

Marina decided that he wanted to learn everything he could about truffles.

And eventually, through a friend of a friend, he got hold of a supplier in Croatia.

After a week, he called me, says, I sent you four kilos of truffles.

I'm like, whoa, no, no, no.

I was very stressed because I didn't have the money to pay.

At the time, that four kilos, or about nine pounds of truffles, was worth $16,000.

They were also a ticking time bomb.

With each passing day, the truffles lost weight and decreased in value.

If Marina didn't sell them fast, he was in big trouble. So he drove from Tucson, Arizona to

Los Angeles, a land of fancy restaurants, and took destiny into his own hands. I got one of those

Burgundy Zaget magazines, and in there you have all the restaurants. So I started calling from the hotel room. I'm

like, my name is Besart. Do you want to see the best truffles in the world? The first chef that I went to,

I bring like a big styrofoam box inside and the chef looks at it. Then it was like the longest

30 seconds of my life. I mean, he grabbed one in his

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