60 Minutes - Sunday, August 21, 2016

Episode Date: August 22, 2016

Halyard Health officials are denying allegations that they provided faulty surgical supplies to hospitals across the United States. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Oreo in every sip. Perfect for listening to the A-side or B-side or bull-side. Order yours on the Tim's app today at participating restaurants in Canada for a limited time. Accusations that a major American manufacturer had knowingly provided defective surgical gowns to U.S. health care workers were first shared with 60 Minutes at a time when the Ebola crisis was spiking. Did you sell protective equipment for Ebola that you knew was defected? No, and frankly, I think the allegations aren't based in the facts. You're saying they're completely false? Yes. Is that what he told you?

Yeah. Evidently, he forgot the 11th commandment. Which is? Do not lie to 60 Minutes. It's being called the financial technology or fintech revolution. Say you need a loan. Fintech sites match borrowers and lenders directly. The way Uber connects passengers with drivers. Need financial planning?

Algorithms are replacing human advisors and brokers. Apps like Venmo let people click money to each other, similar to texting. Many of the innovative services in financial technology that have come along in the past 10 years are not coming from banks. The fort oversaw the trafficking of more than 400,000 slaves. The amount of money invested in slaves was more than the amount of money invested in railroads, banks, and businesses combined. This was the economic engine of Europe and the United States. Lonnie Bunch came to this capital of the slave trade because he was determined to launch America's new national museum on the remains of a ship. What do we find down here?

A very interesting thing. I'm Steve Croft. I'm Leslie Stahl. I'm Anderson Cooper. I'm Bill Whitaker. I'm Scott Pelley. Those stories tonight on 60 Minutes. Welcome to Play It, a new podcast network featuring radio and TV personalities talking business, sports, tech, entertainment, and more.

Play it at play.it. During the most recent outbreak of the Ebola virus, more than 500 health care workers died of the disease, and something called personal protective equipment became essential to preventing the deaths of even more. We're talking about gowns, gloves, masks, and other gear that's designed to block the transmission of deadly bacteria and viruses. They're used every day in hospitals to protect doctors, nurses, and patients. But Ebola was so lethal, it raised the stakes enormously. If the protective equipment fails, infectious bodily fluids can get through, a problem known as strikethrough. At the height of the Ebola outbreak, we received a tip that a major American manufacturer had knowingly provided

defective protective equipment to health care workers in the U.S. and abroad. It's a serious accusation that had never been publicly examined until we first broadcast this story in May. If there's one thing that became evident during the Ebola outbreak of 2014, it's that personal protective equipment properly used could mean the difference between life and death. You probably remember the tragic images from West Africa and the workers in biohazard suits trying to help without getting infected themselves. Certain types of gowns were also used during the outbreak. The nurses at this hospital in Liberia used gowns and full-body suits to protect themselves after two of their top doctors died of the disease.

Every day in the U.S., doctors and nurses rely on some of the same gowns the Centers for Disease Control recommended for Ebola. One of them is the MicroCool surgical gown, made by Halyard Health, which sells about 13 million gowns a year worldwide, including a quarter of the U.S. market. The MicroCool gown is supposed to provide the highest level of protection available against blood-borne bacteria and viruses. Its label says it meets a rigorous industry standard known as Amy Level 4, which means it's impermeable so that blood containing viruses like hepatitis and HIV

won't get on surgeons' skin during an operation. There's just one problem. What was wrong with the Level 4 gans? They would leak. They would leak when we pressure tested them, especially in the seams. Bernard Vizot was the global strategic marketing director for MicroCool and other products from 2012 to early 2015. He worked for Halyard Health, which was part of the Kimberly-Clark Corporation, until November 2014. When two nurses at a Dallas hospital became infected after caring for a patient with Ebola, Vizot says he was relieved the nurses hadn't been using microcooled gowns. But he was concerned by the way the company went into high gear to sell the product.

These gowns were being recommended for use with Ebola? Aggressively being recommended. In what way aggressively? We put a full court press to drive microcooled cells. We told hospitals to stock up on our microcool products. We told them to have at least eight to 12 weeks of product on hand. And that's when things became very difficult for me. Difficult because Vizzo says he knew the gowns were not consistently meeting industry standards. There's a test for this, right? There is a test

and it's conducted in outside facilities. So did your gowns consistently pass this test? No, they did not. Was the FDA aware of this? Were they notified? No, not that I'm aware of. Were customers warned? No, customers were not warned either. Why not? Well, because Kimberly-Clark knew that if they told customers,

they would cost us a lot of business. They didn't tell the public. They didn't tell the FDA. They didn't tell physicians. They told no one. They kept selling the gown to the tune of millions of dollars every month. Michael Avenetti is a California attorney who represents hospitals that are suing Halyard Health and Kimberly-Clark for fraud. He showed us this report by an independent certified laboratory that tested the sleeves of microcool gowns in December 2012 at the request of one of Kimberly Clark's competitors, Cardinal Health. At the time, Cardinal and Kimberly Clark were in litigation against one another.

And Cardinal had these gowns tested. And in fact, the results were disastrous for Kimberly Clark. What do you mean disastrous? Well, if you look through the report, you'll see that 77% of the gowns that were tested failed. 77%? 77%. At hospitals like UF Health in Jacksonville, Florida, we found surgeons who told us they repeatedly experienced strikethrough, with blood getting through their gowns and onto their skin. Some surgeons were so upset about it, they took pictures of their bloody arms and gowns and sent them to the company.

Did you receive complaints from nurses, from surgeons at all? On these gowns? Yeah. Oh, frequently, on a very frequent basis. What kind of complaints? Oh, complaints of strikethrough, sleeves falling off, ties falling off. Sleeves falling off.

Sleeves falling off. Sleeves falling off during the procedure. Were you at meetings where these problems were discussed? Every time. We were the ones who were telling senior management the problems that we were having. And what was their response? I remember the response one time from the COO was, nobody really cares about this. Nobody really cares about surgical gowns. That's just not true. Chris Lowry is the COO Vizzo was talking about, the chief operating officer of Halyard Health. Did you sell protective equipment for Ebola that you knew was defective? No, and frankly, I think the allegations aren't based in the facts.

You're saying they're completely false? Yes. We get less than one complaint for every million gowns sold. And even more so is we've never received even one report of a health care professional contracting an infection as a result of a flaw in our product. Lowry says Bernard Vizot didn't raise his concerns until after he left the company. Vizot says he was fired because he was vocal about the problems. The company also questions the motives of this man, Keith Edgett, the former head of research and engineering for the gowns. In this video deposition, Edgett expresses the same concerns as Vizzo about what was going on at the company. I believe that they were putting

customers in harm's way and I was struggling with it. I want to show you the results of a test performed by Intertech Labs. It shows that 77% of your microcooled gowns failed one or both of the sleeves. 77% is a lot. Anderson, it's very important to put this cardinal test data into context. First, extreme outlier test results. We had never seen test data that reflected anything like this before or for that matter since. Halyard showed us its own test results from independent laboratories. The reports show the sleeves passed some of the time and failed at others. But Chris Lowry says they passed far more than they failed. And when they failed,

it was at much lower rates than the Cardinal test suggests. For the test in February 13, 18 out of 85 samples failed. That's 21 percent. We have to look at a test failure in the context of all the tests that are passing. But you have failures in the product. You're still selling the product and you don't inform the FDA, and you're not informing customers. It's important to understand that no manufacturing process is perfect. You take that information. But these failures are above the industry standard. You're allowed a certain amount of failures.

When you actually fail a test, though, that's above the failure rate that's already built in. And in the testing that we completed after the cardinal testing, we believe that we were fully compliant with our requirements for the product as it had been cleared. Is that what he told you? Yeah. Evidently, he forgot the 11th commandment. Which is? Do not lie to 60 minutes. The company had shown us this March 2013 lab report. As part of its proof, the gowns passed the test. But attorney Michael Avenetti says that's not what really happened. They claim to have submitted 79 samples and 75 passed. They said they passed, yeah. Well, they didn't pass.

They failed. Because they didn't submit 79 samples. They submitted 85 samples. And in fact, six of the samples weren't even tested because the sleeves were so bad. The lab took them out of the package and they didn't even test them because it was obvious what was going to happen. And they didn't include that as failures? No, they didn't. And in fact, I mean, I brought the document that shows it.

It's a spreadsheet prepared internally at Kimberly-Clark. It says six failed, not tested due to unsealed seams. Lot fails. You're saying this is an example of fuzzy math? No, this isn't fuzzy math. This is fraud. When we asked Halyard about this, the company acknowledged it hadn't told us about those untested samples, but denied it was trying to deceive us. The company says even if a sleeve seam fails, the risk of a doctor or nurse getting infected is extremely low. They'd have to have some type of cut that would allow transmission.

The defect would have to be in that exact place. The surgeon would have not covered the cut or abrasion as they should have per their procedure. There's so many factors that have to align for that to occur. I think it's really easy for him to say that, but he's not the guy doing it. Dr. Sherry Wren is a vice chair of surgery at the Stanford University School of Medicine. The bottom line is, is he going to stand there and volunteer to let me paint some hepatitis C blood on his arms and on his stomach? Probably not, it's going to be my guess. And you've had hepatitis C blood on your arms and on your stomach? Of course. Dr. Wren specializes in gastrointestinal surgery

and is co-author of guidelines for surgeons operating on patients with Ebola. She has no connection to the lawsuit against Halyard, but she does wear microcool gowns for procedures like this one, in which she knew the person she was operating on had hepatitis C. Shortly after we recorded this surgery, Dr. Wren told us she got blood on her arms and hands three times while wearing three different microcool gowns and operating on another patient who also had hepatitis C. We've been told that as long as your skin is intact, you're okay. Actually, with that case, I finished operating at 5 in the morning, and I looked down at my hand, and I realized I had eroded off a callus. So I had ripped my own skin in the morning, and I looked down at my hand and I realized I had eroded off a callus. So I had ripped my own skin in the OR. It does matter then to you that these gowns are impervious?

Yes, of course it matters. Do I really want to have somebody else's infected bodily fluids on my body? No, I do not. Internal documents we obtained suggest the company knew for a long time that it had a problem, which is why we wanted to ask the COO, Chris Lowry, about this November 2014 PowerPoint presentation that identifies a year-and-a-half gap in sleeve seams passing the industry test. We've been told that in November of 2014, a timeline was presented, and your own people acknowledged that there was a year and a half period in which the sleeve seams didn't pass the test, which

demonstrates the gown is impervious. Is that true? It's not. Because this is the presentation. And on the second page, it says gap in sleeve seams passing ASTM 1671, and it shows a year-and-a-half gap. Yeah, Anderson, if it's okay, I've not seen this presentation to my recollection, and so I don't think that it's appropriate, particularly out of any context, to react to it. Do you think stuff like this happens? I think, Anderson, probably from a time perspective, if you don't mind. You want to stop? Yeah, I mean, I think that we probably, I think we've spent the time that we agreed to and team. After our interview, Halyard told us it was not required to meet new, more

stringent testing criteria during that gap shown on the timeline. By January 2015, the company says it had new sealing machines in place to improve the quality of its sleeves. But before the new machines were up and running, the company sold thousands of microcooled gowns to the CDC's Strategic National Stockpile of Medical Supplies for use in future outbreaks and emergencies. The government's National Institute for Occup future outbreaks and emergencies. The government's National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health is conducting research on protective equipment. When it

commissioned tests of gowns produced in 2014 for the stockpile, there were some sleeve failures in three out of four batches tested. Are federal or state authorities looking into this at all? I can't comment on that. They certainly should be, because forget about the civil liability. This is criminal conduct. In its most recent annual report, Halyard Health says it had been served with a subpoena that is related to a United States Department of Justice investigation. The Justice Department and the Food and Drug Administration,

which regulates medical devices, declined to comment further. The company said to us, basically, there's no evidence that anybody got sick or died directly related to a failure of any gowns. If it was so egregious, wouldn't there be many cases, or even one clear case that you could point to that says, look, there was this failure of a gown and this doctor became infected with Ebola or HIV or any other disease. Until now, why would any doctor or nurse have any reason to question Kimberly Clark's representations

regarding the effectiveness of this gown? This story may, in fact, be the first time that physicians and nurses who have contracted disease take a step back and say, you know, maybe that's how I got it. Since our story first aired, one of the people we interviewed, former marketing director Bernard Vizot, died of a heart attack. And last month, FDA inspectors showed up at Halyard Health's corporate offices asking to see documents regarding its micro-cool gowns. Welcome to Play It, a new podcast network featuring radio and TV personalities talking business, sports, tech, entertainment, and more. Play it at play.it. One sector of our economy after the next is being disrupted by new apps and websites, like bookstores, taxis, hotels. Could the banking industry be next on the list?

As we first reported in May, thousands of startups are challenging many aspects of banking. The newcomers argue that this important sector is too set in its ways. It's being called the financial technology or fintech revolution. We looked at the birth of one fintech company founded by two young fintechies who started not unlike the founders of Facebook and Microsoft. Which one of you dropped out of Harvard? That was me. And which one of you dropped out of MIT? By elimination. Right. I was the other one.

Brothers Patrick and John Collison quit college because they had an idea for modernizing the financial industry they thought needed a shaking up. In a world where people can send a Facebook message or sort of upload an Instagram photo and have it available to anyone anywhere in the world like that. I think the fact that that doesn't work for money is something that seems kind of increasingly, honestly, unacceptable to people. And so I think the question for banks is just, can they get there first in providing these services, or will it be somebody new? They want to be the somebody new. John, 26, Patrick, 27, first noticed the problem when they were in high school in Drominear, a dot of a town in Ireland.

And you were coders. Yeah, well, we had both learned to program growing up. And we had been building iPhone apps. We had been building web services. But when they wanted to charge people to buy the apps, they hit an unexpected snag. They had to go to the bank and file paperwork just to be able to collect the money. Like really sort of kind of like getting a mortgage. You'd have to like convince them that you are worth supporting.

And like a mortgage, it would have to be approved. Right, exactly. And it would take sort of weeks for this approval process to happen. And it just seems sort of like this crazy mismatch. So they decided to do something about it. They created software that allows businesses to cut through all that bureaucracy and instantly accept payments online from countries across the globe. We visited their startup, Stripe, in the Mission District, the heart of San Francisco's tech scene, where Patrick showed me how fast

a business could set up a money collection system using Stripe. Set me up. Pretend I'd left 60 minutes to create an online business. What do you want to sell? I think I'm going to sell dog food, homemade dog food. In five minutes, after a few clicks and a cut and paste of their code, Can I see to copy it? he said my company would be ready to receive payment for homemade dog food online right then and there.

I mean, it doesn't need to take any longer. This is how it should work. And this is what would take weeks and weeks and weeks and forms and forms and verification. And going to the bank branch and waiting for paperwork to be mailed back to you and all this stuff. They developed software for buy buttons, letting companies accept payments online fast and in new ways. Stripe charges sellers a small percentage for every transaction. Does the buyer pay anything? The buyer pays nothing.

Nothing. Correct. Their goal is to make money as easy to send as email for everyone, anywhere, on any device. We want to free businesses from just selling via credit cards, you know, to people who hold bank accounts and instead enable people to purchase online, no matter what it is that they use, bank account or no. And of course, this needed the smartphone. It needed this move to mobile. For sure. Stripe is hardly alone in inventing new financial technology or fintech. There's a revolution brewing with thousands of these companies trying to make banking faster and cheaper

and increasingly mobile. Many of the innovative services in financial technology that have come along in the past 10 years are not coming from banks. But by and large, the newcomers are not challenging the core function of banks, taking deposits. Even the startups themselves park the money they handle at FDIC-insured banks. I think there will always be a need for somewhere to store your money, to have it sit. And we think for all their flaws, they have a lot of experience at being banks, right? But fintech is targeting nearly all the other functions of banking. The startups are peeling off one profitable service after another, typically offering them for less. It's called unbundling the banks.

Say you need a loan. FinTech sites match borrowers and lenders directly, the way Uber connects passengers with drivers. Need financial planning? Algorithms are replacing human advisors and brokers. Apps like Venmo let people click money to each other, similar to texting. And if you want to wire money across borders...

I'm sending $500. The CEO of a company called TransferWise showed us how his app can send money abroad and convert currencies, say dollars into pounds, without bank tellers and high exchange rates. Users just swap with each other. And a couple of clicks, and boom. Click, click, done. Do you think that the big banks today see these fintech startups as the barbarians at the gate? Well, there's certainly a lot of curiosity.

What about fear? There can be some fear. Vikram Pandit, the former CEO of banking giant Citigroup, says it's the all-too-familiar tale of David and Goliath. A lot of what you're seeing in fintech is like what you're seeing with Uber or Airbnb. I mean, you've seen the impact of technology on travel. Is that what fintech is doing to banking? It's early days.

And, you know, banks are thinking about it, and they're trying to understand what all this new technology can mean. It could mean trouble with millennials willing to ditch brand-name companies for new apps on their phone. The banks have not realized how different this generation is. who co-founded PayPal and was an early investor in Stripe, cites a survey saying 70% of young adults would rather go to the dentist than to a bank. They don't really have a problem putting their social security number into a web form, but they have a terrible problem going up to a teller in a bank and trying to figure out what exactly you're supposed to do. This is so inefficient. Why am I in this stodgy, outdated room that is

empty and marble-laden? And it's not just about technology. There's also a question of trust. The millennials, their basically formative experience is the financial crisis. They're the ones who really don't trust the banks. And then, I mean, we know that the many banks serve their own interests more than those of their consumers. You're criticizing a system basically that you helped create. Well, there's no question the crisis demonstrated that the system didn't work. And when you looked at the aftermath of the crisis, what needed to be done, you had to make sure banks got back to the basics of banking, and that they had to address the trust issue. But in the meantime, fintech started taking root.

In the last year and a half, investors have poured over $20 billion into the sector, including this banking insider, who's personally invested in a dozen fintech startups. He says that beyond making banking more convenient, these companies can offer options to lower-income families that can't afford to bank at banks. Ten million American households don't even have a bank account. You know, I've read that it is more expensive for a poor person to use the banking system as it exists than for a wealthy person to use the banking system as it exists than for a wealthy person. How is that possible? There are bank account fees on your checking accounts. There are commissions,

there are exchange rates, all adds up. And that doesn't happen with the new companies? The new companies, they're transparent and they tell you what the fees are and they are a fraction of some of the fees that are charged by banks. As services move onto the Internet, they can provide the services more cheaply. And, you know, many of these banks, they have hundreds of thousands of employees, whereas as we see financial services moving online, they don't have to have a physical presence and pay for that. So you can eliminate hidden fees if your cost structure is lower. And I'm hearing eliminate jobs. I mean, we're talking about hundreds of thousands of jobs in the banking sector,

tellers and financial advisors, you name it. I think in general, technology always makes some jobs less relevant or perhaps even obsolete. But I will say that the idea that sort of these people will find nothing else to do seems like it's way too pessimistic on the capabilities of everyone as human beings. Have you looked at the employment scene right now? I think it'll take a while to adjust. But when you think about just the creativity of people and what they're capable of and the sort of aspirations and dreams that they have,

the idea that they're not capable of anything more than sort of performing these automatable clerical tasks, I don't believe that for a second. There are issues with fintech that go beyond the loss of banking jobs. Letting these new companies handle your money could be risky because there are concerns they're inadequately regulated. And there's also the issue of online security. People have been trying to steal money for as long as money has existed. And the best we can sort of as a society hope to do is to sort of design security in the most thoughtful and sort of robust way possible. And that's sort of what we started to do with Stripe.

And it's not like the big banks haven't been breached by hackers. So is fintech the next Uber? Well, it's still a small slice of the financial industry and the powerful and rich old guard is fighting back, its lobby already pushing for more regulation to curb the newcomers. And scrambling to adapt, big banks have begun increasingly investing in and partnering with fintech,

some looking at a technology called blockchain that's behind digital currencies like Bitcoin. I think it's kind of human nature to always want to see these things as a competitive dynamic that either technology companies have to win or the banks have to win, and one of them is going to lose. It's not as black and white. Yeah.

Do you think what you have can be brought to a bank like Wells Fargo or JPMorgan Chase? Can they integrate this, or it's one or the other? I think they can be part of it. They can be part of sort of the infrastructure that powers it, and again, we work with Wells Fargo and many other banks today, but I think that they can only be part of it. They can be part of sort of the infrastructure that powers it. And again, we work with Wells Fargo and many other banks today. But I think that they can only be part of it. They can't be sort of the agents driving it forward. He says that over one in four Americans online have used Stripe in the last year, including on sites like Facebook and Twitter and department stores like Saks and Macy's. The software is embedded on both

Apple Pay and Android Pay, and it's already helped hundreds of thousands of businesses accept money online. Even though Stripe has some stiff competition, like PayPal, the brothers have made two covers of Forbes, and the four-year-old company is now valued at $5 billion. Not bad for two brothers who not long ago had to beg their bank branch for approval. When you have a major technological shift like this, it's not clear that automatically the existing financial players are the ones who are going to win. Even though they're huge. Even though they're huge. They're powerful. There were plenty of huge retailers before Amazon,

but somehow this little upstart from Seattle in just a few short years gobbled up the business. Banks are so rich. Do you worry that they're going to come and buy you out? Well, luckily we have a say in that, and we want to build a long-term independent company. Oh, you want to buy them out? In the months since we first broadcast this story, the fintech world suffered a black eye.

Lending Club, once the poster child of online loans, has been tarnished by revelations of improper lending. It's led to the ouster of its CEO, a Justice Department investigation, shares dropping, and discussion of more regulation. Welcome to Play It, a new podcast network featuring radio and TV personalities talking business, sports, tech, entertainment, and more. Play it at play.it. This past fall, we told you about a ship named for St. Joseph that sank in a terrible storm more than 200 years ago.

Half the passengers survived, but the sea closed over more than 200 men, women, and children who were locked below the deck. You would think a disaster like that would be legendary, but the St. Joseph was a slave ship, and the screams bursting from the hold were the cries of cargo. Today, the silence of those lost voices is unbearable to Lonnie Bunch. He's the founding director of the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture, scheduled to open in September in Washington. Bunch found that to tell history, the Smithsonian would have to make history,

and so began a quest for the remains of a shipwreck in a land so unchanged that an 18th century slave would recognize it today as the last shore he called home. Mozambique Island defies the erosion of time. The Portuguese colonists who claimed it 500 years ago would still find the cut of the cloth that borrows the wind as familiar as the cut of the stone that framed their city. Lonnie Bunch came to this capital of the slave trade because he was determined to launch America's new national museum on the remains of a ship. I thought it wouldn't be hard, so I called museums around the world and said, OK, look, you must have some things, you must know where I can get some material,

and everybody said, nope. And they said to me, well, Lonnie, almost every slave ship was at the end of its life, so it's probably at the ocean floor. And then I got scared. Then I thought, well, I'm not going to be able to find this. Mozambique Island rises from the Indian Ocean, south of the equator. It was one of the points in what was called the triangular trade, goods from Europe to Africa, slaves to the New World, and cotton, gold, and tobacco back to the old. In the 1400s, the Portuguese were the first Europeans to trade in slaves, and they became the largest, followed by the English, French, Spanish, and Dutch.

On Mozambique Island, the Portuguese built a fortress that they called St. Sebastian for the Christian martyr who was captured, chained, and murdered in Rome in the year 288. The irony of that name was the only thing here the Portuguese failed to grasp. You know, when you look at the enormous effort that went into building this fort, they were protecting something that was hugely valuable to them. They recognized that the key to their future as nations with economic prosperity was the slave trade. The fort oversaw the trafficking of more than 400,000 slaves. Bunch was certain there had to be evidence of a ship, and he soon

discovered he wasn't the only one looking. Give me a hand. He found a group of researchers calling themselves the Slave Wrecks Project, and they were following a promising lead. What do we find down here? A very interesting thing. Desio Mwanga is a Mozambican archaeologist, helping the Slave Wrecks Project locate the beginning of the story. This is a tunnel that was used to put slaves inside the island and put them out of the island as well.

Under the old Portuguese town, tunnels connected holding pins to the sea. The devout Portuguese preferred to keep slaves in transit out of sight. How were these slaves captured? Some individuals, African individuals, specialized in capturing slaves. So they would go and raid villages far, far from here. And they walked, chained, all the way from there to here. And of course, lots of them died on the way. So these were Africans capturing Africans? Yes, yes. It was not only a business for the Portuguese, the Europeans in this case, but also for some of the local chiefs as well. Those local chiefs came to this auction house to sell captives to European clients. A male in the late 18th century, early 19th century,

would go anywhere from $600 to $1,500, which is probably about $9,000 to $15,000 today. This was incredibly lucrative. In the years before the Civil War, the amount of money invested in slaves was more than the amount of money invested in railroads, banks, and businesses combined. This was the economic engine of Europe and the United States. By the time you got here... The enslaved marched from the auction house down this ramp and onto the ships.

What you probably had was almost an assembly line. You'd bring people, you'd sell people, then you would move them onto the boats and off to the New World. What does black America need to hear, in your estimation, from the echoes off these steps? I think all Americans need to recognize that as tragic and horrible as slavery was, as big an economic shadow as it cast, the one thing it didn't do was strip people of their humanity. And I wish that all of us were as strong as the people that walked down those steps and got on those boats. We're wading out into the tidal flats. If Lonnie Bunch was to find his slave ship, he would need Steve Lubcoman, co-founder of the Slave Wrecks Project.

He's an anthropologist from George Washington University who believes that slavery is the greatest story in maritime archaeology. Think about the way in which computers nowadays affect all of our lives. It's not just, it doesn't affect just the computing industry. Everything is interlinked and depends on this. And the slave trade in its time was truly the equivalent. It reached into and influenced and created the modern world. Even so, it's not likely much has survived centuries under the sea. We're not talking about a hull that you're going to find

down there and masts and all of that that you would imagine in your mind's eye. We don't find intact ships. We find parts of ships. You have to go underneath the water, add some difficulty to this, find the pieces, try to put them back together, and put together the story that you can. The story Lubcoman was searching for wasn't discovered underneath the water. His ship was lost in the dry official records of Cape Town, South Africa, which reach back to the 1600s. The Slave Wrecks Project had been diving into these binders for months when they discovered the St. Joseph, known in Portuguese as the São José.

The São José arrived at Mozambique Island in 1794, the cargo manifest records 1,500 iron bars for ballast and more than 400 slaves bound for Brazil. This is a cargo sketch from a different but typical ship. Paul Gardullo is a historian of slavery and curator of the Smithsonian Museum. Bodies and souls laid side by side with no room to move, no sanitation. Many people on these voyages died. How long was that journey? A journey like the one that Sal Jose took could take up to four or more months. This is slavery on a global industrial scale. From about 1500 through the 19th century, through the late 1800,

we're talking about at least 12 million people. Off Cape Town, South Africa, the captain of the Sao Jose was caught between a violent storm and a nautical chart spiked with warnings. Whittle Rock, Bellows Rock, Rocky Bank. The Sao Jose crashed. 212 slaves were killed. And because money had been lost, there was an investigation. They wanted to have independent verification.

Interviews with survivors have survived. This is the crew's account, and right here we have the captain's account. And he signed his name here 220 years ago. Incredible. He said he decided to save the slaves and the people. The people are the crew. The slaves are just cargo. The 200-year-old investigation pinpointed the people. The people are the crew. The slaves are just cargo. The 200-year-old investigation pinpointed the site, and in 2010, divers responding to a metal detector discovered bars of iron. One of those divers is Jakob Boschoff, an archaeologist with

South Africa's Izeko Museum and Lubcoman's partner in founding the Slave Wrecks Project. Boshop says these are the iron bars we mentioned a moment ago on the Sao Jose Manifest, the ballast for the ship. So you actually were excavating the sand on the sea bottom. This stuff was under the sand. Under the sand. So you're in how much water? About five meters of water. About 15, 20 feet of water. That's correct. And then these are two feet under the sand

below that. That's right. Turns out shallow water only makes the work harder. Surf tosses the divers and sand vacuumed away settles back within hours. But after more than 300 dives, this is what they've recovered so far. These are nails that pinned sheets of copper over the hull for protection. What looks like a lump of concrete is marine growth on a wooden pulley block, similar to this one used to hoist sails and cargo. This x-ray shows the two white spaces where rope was threaded around the wheel. The divers discovered wood that a lab would later trace back to Mozambique and this may be the most revealing artifact of all. Masked by two centuries under the sea. X-rays show a shackle similar to this used to bind slaves. So there's a long bar running through,

and shackles often were on a long bar, the leg shackles especially. So a long iron bar with a round metal ring. Yeah, that sort of thing, yes. And in this particular case, leg shackles. Leg shackles. That's right. Have you found everything that's down there now? No, not at all. Not even class. We've got a lot more to do. We've only scratched the surface at this stage. How can you be sure that the wreck you found off Cape Town is in fact the Saint-Jose. There are certain types of artifacts that are found on this wreck that put us within a particular time bracket.

Ceramics, for example. But then there are other things that I think are very important. We have an account that gives enormous specificity in terms of geographic location, and it tells us the bay in which it was located. Finally, we find a document in Lisbon that says the San Jose has manifest when it left Lisbon, and the first item on that said 1,500 bars of iron ballast. You put all of those different lines of evidence together, it's almost statistically impossible that it could be anything else. They are the first artifacts known to be preserved from a ship

on a voyage of slavery, and they will anchor the slavery exhibit this fall when Lonnie Bunch opens the National Museum of African American History and Culture on the Mall in Washington. The story of slavery is everybody's story. It is a story about how we're all shaped by it, regardless of race, regardless of how long we've been in this country. We hope that we can be a factor to both educate America around this subject, but maybe more importantly, help Americans finally wrestle with this, talk about it, debate it, because only through that conversation can we ever find the reconciliation and healing that I think we all want.

I'm Scott Pelley. We'll be back next week with another edition of 60 Minutes.