Front Burner - Front Burner Introduces: The Six Billion Dollar Gold Scam

Episode Date: July 1, 2024

It was the biggest gold discovery in history...until it wasn’t. In 1995, Canadian mining company Bre-X announced to the world it had found a significant amount of gold deep in the jungles of Indonesia. Stock prices soared as investors worldwide fought to stake their claim. But when Bre-X’s chief geologist mysteriously fell from a helicopter over the jungle, the story of the billion dollar discovery began to unravel. Nearly three decades later, no one has ever been held accountable. In the new podcast, The Six Billion Dollar Gold Scam, host Suzanne Wilton takes you from the jungles of Indonesia to small town Alberta, Canada, to investigate what really happened and find out more about the man behind the biggest goldmine fraud of all time. Produced for the BBC World Service and CBC by BBC Scotland Productions. More episodes are available at: https://link.chtbl.com/Duo5eihh

This is a CBC Podcast. Hey everybody, I'm Allie Janes. I'm a producer on FrontBurner and we have a special bonus episode for you today from another podcast called the $6 billion gold Indonesia. It was called the gold discovery of the century. And at its height, Briex reported that the gold mine was worth $70 billion U.S. But the high life didn't last long. By 1997, a different story was emerging, one that turned it into a scam that fooled the world. We have the first episode of the $6 billion gold scam for you now. Have a listen.

First, a warning. The following episode contains difficult subject matter, including references to suicide and death. A man named Michael DeGuzman is standing in front of a hotel mirror. He's getting ready for a night out in a mining town in East Kalimantan, Indonesia. De Guzman is a short, heavy-set Filipino man. He combs his thick black hair to one side and opens up his silk black shirt to show off his 24-karat gold chain. De Guzman wore a lot of gold. It's the evening of March 18th, 1997.

He heads to a karaoke bar, has a few drinks, sings his heart out to Frank Sinatra. The next morning, Rudy Vega, de Guzman's colleague, knocks on his hotel door. De Guzman opens the door. He's disheveled, half awake. He's here to take him to the airport. They make it to the helicopter pad. Rudy Vega rushes to get him ready, and de Guzman climbs into the chopper. He's by himself back there, and the pilot helps him with his seatbelt. De Guzman doesn't recognize the pilot.

He's not the usual guy. The front passenger door snaps shut. Check. The rear door is pushed forward and closed firmly. Lock. Check. Then they take off, headed for Buseng, the site of the largest gold discovery in the world. The chopper flies across a blanket of green jungle. It tips toward a peat swamp. Crocodiles slither into the water. The surface ripples from the downdraft. Below lie nine-foot king cobras and other venomous snakes.

Wild pigs forage for nuts and roam through the vines. It's all familiar to de Guzman. He's taken this flight many times. It's all familiar to de Guzman. He's taken this flight many times. It's now 10.30 a.m. Central Indonesia time, 20 minutes since takeoff. The weather and visibility is good. The helicopter is flying at an altitude of 800 feet.

A routine flight until suddenly something's wrong. There's a pop, a loud bang, and a whoosh of air. The pilot maintains control, dips the helicopter to reduce speed, and he looks back to see what's happening. He sees an empty seat. The left-hand door is fully open. De Guzman is gone. The pilot radios the tower, shouting, My passenger has jumped from the helicopter. Michael De Guzman plunges 800 feet into swampy Borneo rainforest, presumed dead. presumed dead. Ten years later, I was sent halfway around the world by the Calgary Herald to investigate de Guzman's death. This story has haunted me ever since. How was he tied up with the wild ride of Briex, a small Canadian mining company, and their once-in-a-century gold discovery? It's still a mystery.

I'm Suzanne Wilton from the BBC World Service and CBC. This is the $6 billion gold scam. A story about the lengths people will go to in pursuit of getting rich and how greed can obscure the truth. This is Episode 1, The Fall. I've just landed in Jakarta, Indonesia. This is where it all began. I'm here to trace the events that led up to that moment in the helicopter.

It's hot, humid and loud, the opposite of my Canadian hometown, Calgary, Alberta. All these years later, I still have questions about what happened at that exploration site. And I'm here to get answers. Starting with what happened to the chief geologist, Michael de Guzman. Nobody was bigger on the scene than de Guzman, and it was almost like Jakarta in the 1996-97, and de Guzman, with an infinite amount of money, were virtually made for each other like a match in heaven. An infinite amount of money were virtually made for each other like a match in heaven.

Jim Richards is an Australian geologist who came to Indonesia in the 90s. They could not get the money in fast enough. They were chucking money at us as geologists. Spend it, spend it, drill more holes. It was just nuts. During the mining boom here in the mid-90s, gold prospectors from around the world, mostly from developed countries, descended on Indonesia, exploiting the country's mineral wealth for their own gain. And the boom meant there was money to spend. I've never seen a wall of money coming at you like that, that it was insisting that you spend it.

Normally it's completely the opposite. All of the sort of restrictions that might have been there from quite an Islamic country weren't there. It was the drinking and the sort of free living and the fast and loose lifestyles that were going on. For expats in the mining scene, the rules were different. They lived in a bubble of sorts, mostly separate from the locals, flush with cash, often spending it on booze and women. I went into one hotel and I have never seen so many prostitutes in my life soliciting men and women in the vast atrium of that hotel.

It was just one vast whorehouse. It was just insane, the whole place. I've never seen anything like it, and I've been around, you know. And de Guzman, an experienced geologist with a track record of finding gold, was deep in the scene. De Guzman had women every town, every nook and cranny he went through, there were girls there that he had on his payroll, that he partied with, that he, you know, had as his girlfriends.

And it was, yeah, it was one big rolling party for Mike. Everybody I spoke to was, it was, if you were out with Mike, it was a big night. De Guzman embraced the expat life. He hit up the strip clubs, loved karaoke, wild nights, and chasing women. The side of him that was the narcissistic side of him, which was women, it was booze, it was parties. Junior geologists who worked under him referred to him as a tyrant because of the long hours he expected them to work on site. Mike was very controlling. He did seem to have a very forceful personality. De Guzman was often described as an enigma, hard to get to know. If he wasn't partying, he kept to himself. He was born in Manila in the

Philippines on Valentine's Day in 1956 and got his degree in geology in 1983. He headed to Indonesia in the late 80s, looking to make it big, and he chased gold as hard as he chased women. He'd obsessively track for days through the intense heat of the jungle, looking at rock formations and signs of gold, spent hours writing up reports. De Guzman was a perfectionist, hyper-focused on the hunt for the motherlode, the giant gold deposit every

geologist dreams of. And that search took him to a place locals call the Land of Hope, where he met the man who would change his life. Kalimantan is the Indonesian portion of the island of Borneo, the largest island in the Indonesian archipelago. It's home to massive mineral deposits. Kalimantan means river of gold and diamonds. Kali is a river, emas is gold, and intan is diamonds. So they've been mining gold in Kalimantan since, well, more than a thousand years, and diamonds.

So it's been a source of wealth for as long as history goes back, almost. Scottish geologist Roger Margery-Banks spent half his working life mining in the remotest parts of the world. When you go with a panning dish to a gold-bearing stream and scoop up a pile of dirt and shake it around, and there's these gleaming butter yellow grains on the floor of the dish, it's a moment of magic excitement, which I think everybody's caught up in. But it's a beautiful object. It's a valuable object. A mineral deposit that is rich enough to be worked for a profit

is called an ore body. That's what de Guzman and every other exploration geologist was on the hunt for. But convincing people that an ore body is worth mining takes willpower and persuasion. Someone who had it, and in spades, was a Dutch geologist called John Felderhoff. He had a rugged, strong sort of face with almost built-in skull lines. Felderhoff was often compared to the movie character Indiana Jones. He was quite an intimidating sort of guy, actually,

particularly with his heavy Dutch accent, which was there, and his d'art taciturn character, which he had. No, no, he was quite a scaly guy until he got to know him. He'd made a name for himself a couple of decades earlier as the man who discovered a giant gold and copper mine in Papua New Guinea. In 1980, he moved to Indonesia, lured by the promise of gold. In the mid-80s, Marjorie Banks and Felderhoff spent a day traveling up a river in a small boat and a couple of days trekking and camping out at a gold property, a parcel of land that Felderhoff had these rights to and he was trying to sell it to Marjorie Banks.

John's an interesting character actually. You know he knows more than he's saying which is a lot better of course than saying more than you know but he gives the impression of being an honest guy in fact i can vouch he's a competent geologist a man of strong opinions i would say probably someone who doesn't tolerate fools gladly but i got on well with him, actually. I quite enjoyed his company. The deal went nowhere with Marjorie Banks, and Felderhoff continued on his quest to find a gold property that would appeal to investors. There was a guy who wanted to go smoke a cigarette and drink a beer after digging in the rocks all day.

Jennifer Wells worked for Maclean's, Canada's national news magazine, and she was on the story for years. Jennifer has here an entire plastic tub of files, files from her days of investigations, and there are pages and pages of notes and interviews. You've kept this all these years. We're a long time since. Why? Obsessive. It's an unresolved story. Jennifer remembers Felderhoff had this reputation for sniffing out gold. And he had a very interesting background in terms of being a so-called river walker, multiple sufferer of malaria.

What's a river walker? someone who has such a connection with the land that they have an almost innate ability to understand where, you know, seams of minerals may be present. In the mid-'80s, Felderhoff earmarked a site in a small community called Busang, deep in the jungle of Kalimantan, as remote as you can get, 200 kilometers from the nearest town. Felderhoff was sure there was gold here,

but he needed to persuade more people. And that was proving difficult, even for him. It was in 1987 that Felderhoff and de Guzman crossed paths for the first time. The two met while working at the same gold mining site in Kalimantan, the Land of Hope. Pretty quickly, they came to share their love of geology over beers in the bush. to share their love of geology over beers in the bush. De Guzman's geological expertise, his determination to find gold, blew Felderhoff away. But they parted ways when de Guzman left the site. But Felderhoff didn't forget de Guzman. And a few years later, the two geologists reunited when Felderhoff decided he needed someone to help push his theory that Busan was worth drilling for gold.

He knew de Guzman would be a valuable asset, a driven geologist, thirsty to make a strike. After agreeing to work with Felderhoff, de Guzman trekked over 32 kilometers of remote jungle and started producing piles of reports about the geology around Busang. Like Felderhoff, he was convinced there was gold there. It's terrain I remember vividly. When I trekked through the remote jungle in 2007, it was a difficult journey. It took five hours over land and another six in a canoe. Busang is the last community in a series of river villages. Today, Kalimantan is largely inhabited by the indigenous Dayak people. The Dayaks, they made tremendous guys to have with you in the field

because they never got lost. They could find their way through the jungle. They were tough, they were reliable, and they were really just great guys. Reporting on this story for the Calgary Herald in 2007, ten years after Michael de Guzman's death, I traveled up the Mahakam River to meet local dyads. I've never forgotten the intense greens of the jungle and the humidity. You go outside and you're instantly covered in sweat. It's so beautiful, but it's also a daunting, difficult place for visitors. I remember what to me were terrifying bugs and leeches that climb inside your trousers and worm their way into your boots.

Vines with sharp hooks like barbed wire carpet the jungle. It's not an easy place to work. But de Guzman and Felderhoff believed they could find their fortunes in Busan. People who are driven by an enthusiasm that keeps them out trying and trying again. And having faith in your ideas because to create an ore body, it's not just what the geologist finds or the metal in the ground. It's the preparedness of your boss, of your company to put up the money.

The shareholders, the investors, you've got to believe if you want them to believe. You've got to sell it. You've got to really put yourself on the line. And if you do that and it works, then you have created that old body out of nothing. You think it's just something there lying on the ground waiting for the first person to stumble over it, but it's not. It's a human creation, like an artwork. And the guy who actually creates it is often the exploration geologist who believes in it and has the personality to sell it and to convince people.

And that's a human characteristic, which I guess you either have or you haven't. De Guzman and Felderhoff both had this enthusiasm, but luck wasn't on their side. Good evening. It's Black Monday. There's never been a day like this one on the stock market. had this enthusiasm. But luck wasn't on their side. Good evening. It's Black Monday. There's never been a day like this one on the stock market. Fear, pandemonium, wreaking havoc in financial markets throughout the world. Foreign investors pulled out after the global stock market crash of Black Monday on October 19, 1987. Even in the gold market, they waited for gold to go up as stocks dived. It didn't.

By the closing bell on the New York Stock Exchange, the Dow Jones Industrial Average had plunged a record 508 points, wiping out all of this year's gains and more. By 1993, both men were down on their luck and they needed a break. The two had expertise, ambition, drive, but it wasn't enough. For their dreams of gold to become a reality, it would take a third man. Just as their fortunes were at a low ebb, Felderhoff got a phone call from a small-time Canadian mining executive he'd met in Australia back in the 80s. David Walsh was an unlikely savior of faltering dreams. He started a small mining company called Briex Minerals in 1989.

The Brie was for his son Brett, the X for exploration, Briex. Walsh's motto was, quote, If you believe in something enough, you can sell it. But he was never very good at the selling part, according to former business correspondent for Maclean's magazine, Jennifer Wells. To me, David didn't stack up at all. He didn't have the salesmanship appeal of the standard promoter or the promoters that I knew, who were always fascinating characters. He didn't have the refinement of a smart chief executive. He didn't have the social ability to engage comfortably, in my experience.

And in 1992, Walsh declared personal bankruptcy. Brieck's limped along, barely. By the beginning of 1993, he had to make his own luck. His thoughts turned to the Indiana Jones geologist he'd once met. Maybe he could give him a few leads. Walsh got on the phone to John Felderhoff. The timing was perfect. Felderhoff and a Guzman needed to drum up investment for Busang. Felderhoff and Walsh agreed to meet a month later at a hotel bar in Jakarta. There'd been a long time between drinks for those guys.

I think there'd been some pretty tough projects and nobody had ever made... They'd never made it, those guys. So this was their... It was almost like their last chance. But he was a kind of sort of desperado who can pull a rabbit out of a hat. That's the nature of these small mineral exploration

companies. One minute you got nothing and you're on the bones of your backside. And the next minute you could be worth hundreds of millions of bucks. It's a really crazy kind of industry like that. But Walsh wasn't completely sold on Busan yet. There were still other sites he was looking at. It worked like this. The Indonesian government would sell the rights to a parcel of land called a property, allowing a company to explore it for a certain period of time. Of course, you wanted to make sure you picked the right property, the one that would yield the most gold for the money you invested in exploration.

And you needed experts for that. Walsh brought geologist Kevin Waddell along from Calgary to advise him on which mining properties to pick. And on the first morning when we got there, there was some parade. I don't know why there was a parade, but right outside our hotel room, we could see a parade on, I guess it's one of the main avenues of Jakarta or whatever. And David, of course, came right up right away with the line. He goes, look, Kevin, gee, we just barely got here and they're already having a parade for us. That was a pretty funny moment. That kind of started it off right there.

Walsh's son, Sean, was with him on the trip, supposedly as a graduation present. But Kevin Waddell suspected it was because Walsh needed his son's American Express card. son's American Express card. If you're wondering how Walsh had any money to invest in gold exploration if he needed to borrow money from his son, it's complicated. There was no money in the company, but Walsh and his wife owned stocks in Briex. And with a financial sleight of hand, Walsh manipulated those stock options and managed to raise $200,000. Small potatoes in the mining world, but enough. I'm standing in the lobby of the Sari Pan Pacific. The meeting that sparked the meteoric rise of Briex minerals started right here.

I just remember I was on one of the main streets of Jakarta and they had like a hundred workers and the grass outside was lush. There were palm trees, nice big palm trees. The hotel itself was five star. I mean, it was first class all the way. It had a flower shop in it and it had a lobby, a nice lobby, and we did meet up with Felderhoff in that lobby a few times. David Walsh, Sean Walsh and Kevin Waddell stayed at this hotel in Jakarta, the Seripan Pacific Hotel, and it's where the meeting took place where Briacks and Gold Fever began. There was an urgency to everything. It was businesslike,

and they were going to get some sort of deal done. That was pretty apparent. The dinner was a very formal affair. Kevin Waddell had to change out of his shorts and Hawaiian shirt and into a suit. John Felderhoff, normally a disheveled figure, his glasses held together by tape, was also wearing a suit. Walsh also suited up, donning a tie, something he hated to do. There was a strict etiquette for these two maverick mining personalities to follow,

and their futures depended on it. If you wanted to set up a company, for example, in Indonesia, you had to have, by law, an Indonesian partner. That's Roger Marjorie Banks again. John Felderhoff suspected he could convince Walsh to invest and get the Indonesian government on side, but needed the dinner to go well. And there was another man at the table, someone who represented an interested third party. Marjorie Banks says no mining deal went through unless you had a businessman.

no mining deal went through unless you had a businessman. Yes, they were all men, with close ties to Indonesian President Suharto. And the very best partner to get was from the top, a member of President Suharto's family. Next best thing would be a general, and after that you'd try and find some super- businessman and everything would become plain sailing for you. Caliman, for example, needed a lot of permits. It was still an area with a lot more restrictions than anywhere else in Indonesia.

Kevin Waddell remembers there was indeed a pretty big roller present with strong connections to the Indonesian government. You know, there were some big players and they were all there to, you know, look at money angles and to get things going. This Adam Tobin, who was apparently had inroads to Suharto, the president. But their big roller, Adam Tobin, their Indonesian partner, didn't sign on immediately. Walsh didn't either. The next few days were tense, but finally Walsh was in.

He agreed to pay 80,000 US dollars for the rights to explore Busan for a certain period of time, with Felderhof taking control of operations on the ground. for the rights to explore Busan for a certain period of time, with Felderhof taking control of operations on the ground. Walsh's role was to convince potential investors there could be gold, so they'd fund the exploration. And Tobin, the prominent Jakarta businessman with links to Suharto was on board too. He'd be able to smooth the way for their license to explore the area with exclusive rights. When confidence of a deal was riding high, Felderhoff made a point of putting Michael de Guzman forward as his project partner.

John Felderhoff actually gave me one of Michael de Guzman's cards and gave one to David and made it very clear that at any project and any work he was doing in Indonesia for David Walsh and Breax Minerals, Michael de Guzman would be involved and would be part of the project. I mean, we were told in no uncertain terms that anything John Felderhoff worked on, Michael de Guzman worked on as well. According to Kevin, once the deal was done,

John Felderhoff and de Guzman refused to let him be involved in the project. Kevin and David stayed in touch, though. You know, we just talked kind of lighthearted about how things were going and, you know, the progress being made. Like, you know, back in these days, everything looked like progress. They kept drilling. They kept getting good results. Things kept getting bigger. The tonnage kept growing. Everything looked tickety-boo. Briex was something called a junior mining company. Typically,

their role was to explore properties to see if they were worth investing in for bigger companies. To do this, companies like Briex had to promote their stock to get the money to fund the exploration. David Walsh needed a credible profile in the press to help draw attention to Buseng and encourage investors to buy Briex shares. While Jennifer Wells followed Briex for Maclean's magazine, she met David Walsh a couple of times. He decided on the advice of sort of communications or public relations people who were working for the company, that his best bet would be to find a reporter who would be sympathetic to their story in order to go big on a big business profile in the American press that would sort of set the stage for David Walsh internationally.

And did they find that? Well, they did. They found it in Fortune magazine. And Richard Behar is the one who wrote the fantastic story. It's Richard Behar. Hi, how are you? How are you doing? Good. I'm just in the middle of putting out a very quick press release. Can I get back to you? Yeah, I do need very much to talk to you.

Richard Behar was one of the only journalists to make it to the exploration site in Busan. He recorded hours of interviews with the key players. When my producers got in touch with Behar, they discovered he still had interviews on cassette tapes stored away in a storage unit in downtown New York. He dug them out and has given us permission to use these Briex tapes. Some unanswered questions I have for you now as per item 17. Three months after the meeting at Seri Pan Pacific, David Walsh, Michael de Guzman, and John Felderhoff were at work exploring the Busang site. They had a license to explore the land from January 1993 to December 1993, one year to make a discovery. In October 1993, they drilled the first hole. Nothing. Then they drilled a second hole. Nothing.

Things were tense. The men were arguing. Felderhoff was losing faith. It was fast approaching December 18th, the last day they could drill before their license ran out. They only had a matter of days left, but de Guzman wanted to keep going. He said he was certain there was gold. He could smell it. And he knew just where to drill hole three and four. It had come to him in a dream. Do you remember going back

when the Guzman was up all night? He'd figured something out? I wasn't there. I heard the story. You heard the story. I'm trying to bring that to life a little bit. And what's the story you heard? What made him call?

That's audio of Richard Behar talking to David Walsh in winter 1997, probing his memory. After his dream, de Guzman phoned David Walsh. I guess Mike woke up, you know, went to bed thinking about it, woke up in the night thinking about it, went to the exploration office in the camp. Got the maps out, geological trends or whatever, and woke Caesar up very excited to confirm his hypotheses.

Now, where was Caesar at the time? He would have been asleep. Where, though? At the camp. That's Cesar Puzpos, de Guzman's right-hand man and a senior geologist for BRIACS. Where would Guzman have been? At the camp. Oh, they both would have been at the camp.

That's my understanding, yeah. And he was looking at maps and other geological information, and then suddenly he had a eureka thought. What was it he realized, though? I guess it was maridatrine, something or other. I don't know. He wanted confirmation of his hypothesis, so he woke Caesar up. Now, was it also John's hypothesis or no?

Not at that point. Jesus Christ. I know. This is... I don't know. Okay. Jesus Christ. I know, this is... I don't know.

Okay. So they drilled the spot apparently pinpointed by de Guzman in his dream. The results came in. Hole 3, gold was detected. Hole 4 was even better. Nothing on this scale had been found in any of the other samples. And each following drill not only reconfirmed de Guzman's eureka moment,

but improved upon it. They discovered the motherlode. Now this is John's best memory on what he said to you when he woke you up from your sleep. Yeah. In Calgary. I hate to harp on it. No, go ahead.

This is the stuff journalism is. Okay. And all he could remember saying was, when you picked up the phone, he said, Look, David, we've got a monster by the tail. You know, I said something like, pardon me, what do you mean? And he said, we've got a monster by the tail. You know, I said, pardon me, what do you mean? And he said, we've got a monster by the tail. So, you can take that saying a few ways. To have a monster by the tail can mean to be in control, guaranteed of success.

guaranteed of success. Or it was a monster underground about to be awoken because John Felderhoff believed they'd only just discovered the tip of its tail. But there's another meaning, probably not what Felderhoff meant. If you let go of the tail of a monster, you're in trouble. It will catch you. But if you hold on, you could also be in trouble. When news hit about the discovery of the gold, Briex began to ascend the stock market at lightning speed. Between December 1993 and May 1996, the price went from barely 20 cents to 200 Canadian dollars a share. At its peak, Briex was valued at $6 billion. People threw their life savings into it. It was heralded as the biggest ever gold discovery. At its height, Briex estimated its busing site held almost 80 million ounces of gold. That's 8% of the entire world's gold resources. Well, we heard about Briex from reports from the press,

and particularly the mining press, and we were all as jealous as hell. Briex had found the one we all hoped to find. The monster was well and truly loose. There'd been nothing like Briex. It was on an unprecedented scale, been nothing like Brie X. It was on an unprecedented scale, and it would make many people rich beyond their wildest dreams. Now I'm returning to this story, traveling through Canada, Indonesia, and the Philippines to uncover why Michael de Guzman falling from the helicopter turned those dreams of gold

into a waking nightmare. Next time on the $6 billion gold scam, the gold rush. Everybody was getting in on it and wondering what we're going to get. Everybody wanted to get rich. Everybody was looking at making a quick buck. How a small prairie town in Alberta, Canada was gripped by gold fever. This small community in the middle of nowhere suddenly became the hub of activity for a mining company with a mother load across the world in Indonesia. But elsewhere, questions were starting to be asked. What if I told you there was no gold there?

I'm afraid to tell somebody about this. They can kill me. The $6 billion gold scam is produced by BBC Scotland Productions for the BBC World Service and CBC. I'm Suzanne Wilton. Our lead producer is Kate Bissell. Producers, Anna Miles, Mark Rickards. Story consultant, Jack Kibble-White.

Music and sound design by Hannes Brown. Additional sound design and audio mix by Joel Cox. Executive editor, Heather Kane-Darling. At CBC, Veronica Simmons and Willow Smith are senior producers. Chris Oak is executive producer. Cecil Fernandez is executive producer. And Arif Noorani is the director. At the BBC World Service, Anne Dixie is senior podcast producer. And John Manel is the podcast commissioning editor. Thanks for listening. That was the first episode of the $6 billion gold scam. The second episode is available right now

to search for the $6 billion gold scam. The second episode is available right now to search for the $6 billion gold scam wherever you get your podcasts.