The Underworld Podcast - The Billion Dollar Scam Cult King who tried to Take Over an Island

Episode Date: October 29, 2024

When Bougainville fought an incredible civil war over a colossal mine, and won, its military leader emerged a hero. But he would soon fall under the spell of a conman and cult leader who wanted the Pacific island—and believed himself to be its king. The unlikely pair soon carved an empire out of a coconut palm jungle—and a wild, picaresque myth about Eden, ancient monarchs, and gold. The wildest thing was that almost everybody in the region believed it. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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with the right skills, certifications, and more. Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Listeners of this shell will get a $75 sponsor job credit at Indeed.com slash podcast. That's Indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero? This is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs. It's November 2006 and trouble is brewing in the village of Tonu, Bougainville. This strange bamboo caspar buried deep in the Pacific Islands dense coconut palm jungles is the home of Noamusinku. A conman and self-style king who in the late 1990s masterminded a gigantic Ponzi scheme,

supercharged by pronouncements of the end times, which fall tens of thousands of people in the region, and raped in some quarter of a big. billion dollars, US, in a part of the world where such figures aren't just a ton of money. They're insane. That wild scheme had ended around 2000, but since then, Mucinca has been on the run tried to revive it, to quote, pull the trigger in his words. And to do so, he's enlisted to help of Bougainville's national hero, a bushy-bearded warrior

who won a war against Bougainville's parent state, Papua New Guinea, with slings, arrows and homemade guns. Together, the pair have formed a strange alliance, demigod and scam artist, hiding themselves away in a sprawling so-called no-go zone. Bucinku said he's the descendant of a ruler of the world, with a direct line to God. He wears an antique British Army redcoat with gold tassels and a brass crown that, in case anybody's unclear he thinks he is, has king written across the front. Some call him a clown.

Others think he's trying to take Bougainville by force. He's certainly got the firepower. Not only is Musinku surrounded by former combatants of Bougainville's bitter civil war, but he's hired a team of Fijian peacekeepers, who've worked all over the world from Iraq to Afghanistan. And he says another 800 are on their way. Since the war, Bougainville has been on a fragile path to statehood and its leaders fear that Mucinco is about to derail the whole thing.

In May 2006, local cops clash with his men near Tunu. Mucinu's men stab a policeman and they torture. four admin buildings. The pressure is mounting. Then at 4 a.m. on November 21st, all hell breaks loose. A column of combatants breaks through Tonu's main roadblock and they open fire on the villages and inhabitants. Mucinu's guards fired back. A pitch battle ensues. Mucinu, who's sitting, as always, at a laptop in his so-called throne room, tries to escape. But as he does, an M-16 round cracks into his jaw, spraying blood all over the floor. One of the Fijian soldiers grabs Musinku, and the pair scurry into the surrounding bush.

It's an hour before the guns fall silent. Four of Misinku's men, and one of the attackers, lay dead. But crucially, the king himself, Bougainville's most notorious criminal, is gone, and nobody can track him down. He'll be back before long, sermonising his cons like never before, in ennobling the fat scars on his face as biblical stigmata. Signs of a bloody covenant is signed with his people. Nobody quite knows who the Raiders were,

and Bougainville's local government disowns them, but few believe them. Whoever they were, the Raiders have made a grave mistake. They came for the king, and they missed. Worse still, they created a martyr, his image written in blood. Noa Mucinu's going to be back with a vengeance, intent on selling his version of Holy Freedom to the Islands and the world. This is the Underworld podcast.

Hello fellow kids and welcome to the weekly podcast about organized crime all over the world, whether it's Mafiosi in Italy, Brooklyn Wise Guys or Conman rebels in the South Pacific. I'm Sean Williams. I'm with Danny Gold in New York City. We're both here. I've just put banter because we're both in New York. So can you give us some banter? Yeah, I mean, this is the first time we've ever recorded in person in a proper studio, well, home studio at our audio producer Dale's apartment. So that is, it's very cool. Yeah, you've got even more tattoos in person.

It's amazing. So you are gearing up for what? In a couple weeks, you're going to go to Japan. I'm hoping you're going to take care of yourself for once. Anything else to report you're in? No, I mean, we had a guy reached out to us on Instagram with some Osaka rec, so that was cool. but yeah, Big Hell Mary, we really want Underworld podcast

to be a radio channel on the new Grand Theft Auto that's coming out because it would be cool and they'd probably pay us substantial amounts of money for that. So if anyone is in that world, rock star games,

selling rights to rock star games, maybe you're James Rockstar, the son of President Rockstar of the Rockstar Studios, you know, reach out, or maybe you're annoying enough and persistent enough to start some sort of online campaign

to get them to make this happen. Just holler at us. We would like to get people. paid more money. Yeah, they're Scottish, right? I love those people. Are they? Yeah. Yeah, Scottish, weirdly, I think. Anyway, we love you. Give us money. Some brief housekeeping. Thanks so much for listeners who joined the Patreon. We've got plenty coming out besides the main show. I think we're going to record something in person after this one as well, so we hope you enjoy that. Thanks also to the ton of you getting in touch about episode ideas on the email. Like,

I can't remember you said it last week or not, but we've been doing this for four years now. We kind of expected to run out after a year of episode ideas, but we've got tons of tons and tons like I've got a spreadsheet of them longer than the shopping list for one of to do these parties so get in touch yeah there we go there was a joke uh the underworld podcast at gmail.com for all of that we really try hard to respond to everything that we get guys and I'm sorry if you're one of the ones that we didn't respond to uh Halloween's coming up so get yourself an underworld t-shirt go to that house party as a podcast that's a really good idea and oh yeah if you haven't done already to subscribe and rates on whichever platform you're

listening on so that helps us out that's a lot of stuff so should we get on with the uh Today's show? Yeah, I think we shall. You probably know this already, but today's episode is saying I was out in Papua New Guinea Ford just under a year ago, I think it was. And the story that came from that trip, published a round of Fortnite go at Harper's Magazine. It's called The Island King. It is very long, and like most of my stories, involves me being a bit thick and being taken on a long and winding journey into a jungle.

I don't know why all of my stories involved this. To meet Noa Mishinku, who is a con man, come cult leader, come separate as rebel, come firing brimstone pastor and of course king with a little crown that has king written on it i've won these right saying about boganville since i moved to the pacific and i was going to focus on this giant mine called panguna and the people who still live there and we'll get into that in a bit but when i found out about mucinco i was just hooked and uh god bless will stevenson for agreeing to send me there journalism is dead i'm just a pump in its lifeless body for blood cells at this point uh if you can please share that story around because it makes me look very good and probably

keeps me in the black for a little bit longer. But before we dive into the nuts and bolts of Noam Missinku, let's just set the stage. Because first, you've probably never heard of Bougainville, and that's fine. But also, there is no Island King if all the crazy shit that happened to Bougainville doesn't happen before he shows up.

And when I say crazy, I mean coconut cults, mystical GIs, Bob Hope, South African mercenaries, the world's biggest mine, and its most incredible modern military victory. So yeah, this is crazy stuff. Yeah, I mean, I've heard of that place, but I've never heard of any of the things you just mentioned besides maybe Bob Hope.

So, yeah, I'm intrigued. Yeah, let's get into where and what Bougainville actually is, which is a funny name if you're Australian, but for everyone else, it doesn't mean a thing. So Bougainville is a teardrop-shaped island. It's around the size of Vermont or Kosovo or Lebanon. And if you're looking on a map, draw a line directly north from Brisbane, Australia, and you're there.

It's the farthest-flung province of PNG, And if you look closely, you'll see that it's right next to Solomon Islands, which is a separate country. And it really is right next to the Solomon's. I mean, like three miles, I think, at the closest point. And geographically, it is part of the Solomon Islands. But thanks to a succession of white men, it's been in PNG. And if you want to know more about that country, which could easily lay claim to be the maddest on earth, I mean, no one knows how many people live there, for example.

You can check out our old show on the so-called rascal gangs of the PNG capital Port Moresby from January 2022, which is pretty unhinged stuff. But Bougarville is named after a French explorer, same guy named a flower, so well done to him. And it's completely stunning. It's volcanoes, pristine beaches, waterfalls, and everything is quilted in jungles of coconut palms. It's actual treasure island in real life. Perhaps because of all this stuff, Bougainville and its surroundings in the late 19th and early 20th century, it attracts a host of fair-skinned cads. crazies and con men. In 1880, a French nobleman convinces hundreds of people to hop on a boat to a nearby island he calls Newville France, but it's a scam. There's nothing there and tons of them die

of disease. Wait, so what's the scam? Like, was he on the boat? Because how does that work? Like, he scams them to get on the boat for an island that doesn't exist and they all just die? Yeah. Yeah, that's it. He gets a boat ticket. Was he on the boat? He was on the boat with them. And they're like, hey, welcome to New France. It's a bad scale. It's not, I mean, they're on the boat and they died, so he got, he kind of got what he wanted, right? Did he die? I don't think he did. I think he didn't get malaria, so well done, well done to that guy. All right. Yeah, yeah. Just a few years later in 1884, Germany swallows Bougainville and New Guinea

into its empire, separating it from the Solomons, which Britain controls, and Berlin turns the island into a giant copper plantation, copper being the dried skin of coconuts, which is turned into useful oil. And in 1902, a Bavarian student called August Englehart washes up on the nearby island of Cabacom, and he starts a cult based on the Holy Trinity. Yes, that's right, man, son and coconut. Oh, and he makes all his devotees go around naked, because, I mean, he's German, and he eats only coconuts that he dies in 1919, covered in sores and weighing only 66 pounds. So if you can't fall to Zempec, you could give that a try. I mean, I don't know. I feel like fresh coconut water, like right out of the coconut, is actually one of the keys to health.

It's definitely a key to beating a hangover, you know? Yeah. Did you used to do it quite a lot? I mean, yeah, like, I'll buy a coconut at the bodega for like $5 and like hit that shit with a hammer, stick a straw on there, and I'm good to go. I see you're that guy. It's like a vacation. By this point, of course, Germany has lost the First World War.

Spoiler alert. Naughty Germany, I'm sure they won't do anything like that again in under two decades. And it's broken up its empire. Bougainville falls into Australian hands, but in 1948, the Japanese take it, and they subject the Bougainville to the same kind of brutality they dish out all over Asia at the time. So here's the thing. In 1943, the US invades the island, and it erects a giant corrugated city in the village of Torekina. Within a fortnight, it's landed 34,000 men, an airfield, a movie theatre at Bowling Alley, Bob Hope, there we go, plays a show there, and they've literally paved paradise and put up a parking lot.

That's so sad, isn't it, that song? The Americans inflict a spectacular defeat on the Japanese, who lose up to 65,000 troops to the Americans 727, which is, yeah, I call that a win. But the biggest losers are the Bougainvilleans themselves. Up to a quarter of them die in the war. They're basically like extras to a bloody movie played out in their very own backyard. And by the way, there's still a place near Torokina today called Hells of Popping Ridge, which is nuts, and very funny in a Papua New Guinea.

an accent. Anyway, after the war, Bougainville once again becomes an Australian colony, and in 1961, an Aussie geologist discovers gold and copper in a sacred mountain called Panguna in the middle of the territory. By 1972, this thing is the largest man-made hole on earth, deep enough to stack five statues of liberty, and wide enough to fit the span of the Golden Gate Bridge. Okay, look, I know that it was probably atrocious conditions to dig that hole, but I would have loved to have seen it. Like, big holes just rule, you know, they're awesome. If you go to the beach and just dig a big hole with your friends, it's awesome. Big holes rule would get that on a T-shirt. I mean that so really well. I have been to the

big hole. The big hole is big. It's very big indeed. Even today, over half a century, it's still the second biggest hole in the earth behind one in Utah, I think. The company that runs Panguonin, is called Bougainville Copper Limit, it'll BCL, and it is a subsidiary of Rio Tinto, which is this giant British-Australian evil megacorp mining firm. And it's a money-making machine, is Panguna. At one point, it accounts for over half of PNG's entire exports, which is mostly why, in 1975, when PNG gets independence from Australia

and Bougainville declares itself independent too, PNG tells the Bougainvillians, sit down and shut up. Panguna, in case I haven't made this clear, it's colossal. BCL, they build roads, schools, entire town, so these Aussie roughnecks who come in and live apartment blocks, the likes of which the locals have never before seen. And here's a company commercial from the time. Panguna is in a true sense a mining town. The resident population is about 3,500. The town, situated in a valley, has a post office, banking facilities, supermarket complex, travel service,

tavern, coffee shop and recreational facilities which include squash, tennis, cricket, football and a swimming pool. Doesn't that sound nice? Well, it is, for the foreigners at least. BCL boots out thousands of Baganville landowners and it gives them a tiny fraction of 1% of the mine's profits.

It dynamites their sacred land, pollutes their rivers, basically owns P&G's politicians. I mean, who are the real crooks, Danny? Those guys are mining. And Congress. And Congress, of course, yes. So the Bougainvillians are pissed off.

And these are not people to be trifling with. Land riots are the bedrock of the island's culture. Writes the LA Times in 1988, quote, The tribes on Bougainville Islands speak 19 languages. But they use English to describe the giant Panguna Copper Mine in the center of the island's vast jungles. They call it the mine of tears. Bonjour, compadre.

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we roll with your goals because we're built for what you're building. Fit for your ambition. First Citizens Bank. Now we're going to head to the meat of this story and the crime itself. Thanks for hanging in there, guys. Because in November 1988, BCL holds an inquiry into itself

over allegations it's turning a river that runs through Panguna into toxic sludge. And halfway through this meeting, a BCL employee named Francis owner storms out. declares it a sham. This guy, owner, he is something different. He's highly educated and charismatic and he's from a town called Guava that's been bulldozed to make way for the mine. Having spent years as a dump truck driver, owner gets night shifts as a cleaner which he then used to photocopy

company documents proving that is low-balling the locals. After owner storms out of this meeting, he demands Panguna's closure and $10 billion in damages. In Bougainville, he warns, you do not come between the people and their land. And this is an empty threat. Days later, men still dynamite from a company depot, and they blow up electrical pylons. They attack mine workers and burn down parts of its airport. BCO asks PNG to send in the army,

the PNG defense force, or, nicely, the PNGDF. Francis owner christens what he calls the Bougainville Revolutionary Army, or BRA, borrowing from the language of Cold War movements of the time. Panguna closes down, the Aussies flee and in 1990 the PNGDF blockades Bougainville and throws thousands of people into camps. Several thousand more die from lack of medical supplies, but rather than lay down and die, the BRA's numbers skyrocket.

These guys, right, these guys are bad ass. At first they're fighting with bows and arrows, slingshots, bush knives, but they're guerrilla geniuses fighting on their own turf. They dig up old weapons, cachets left behind by the Japanese. and they ambush PNGDF troops, killed them, steal their gear, the whole thing. One of them told me at the time he'd done this near the current capital town of Buka. He tied these guys up, threw some in the sea to drown,

ran the others over in his truck and stolen M16 rifles, and an M79 grenade launcher. It's pretty brutal stuff. The PNGDF carries out plenty of war crimes too, and Bougarville's premier has beaten unconscious by them at one point, and his aid is blinded from a pistol whipping, and he tells a report of the quote, they forced me to lick up the blood of a policeman who had been shot that morning.

They're explicitly fighting against the pollution of the mine these guys. I think they might be the world's only actual eco-wariers, but this isn't the most impressive part. The blockade means the BRA has no access to medicine, fuel, building suppliers. I mean, here's a snippet from my story, quote, The rebels have worked at Panguna, miners, turners, fitters, forges, joiners, plumbers, painters, smelters, glazers, scavenged pipes and vehicle parts

and refashioned them into more than 50 hydroelectric generators. They also made weapons from the mine's twisted wreckage and I'll continue. I mean, Sean Williams, we're just, we're going to let this guy keep quoting himself. Like, he's earned it. I've clearly been reading a lot of John McPhee

when I did this. But the most extraordinary aspect of the BRA's resistance was that the use it made of Bougainville's erstwhile staple crop. The coconut, islanders ate its flesh, drank its milk and sealed their wounds with its leaves. They wove it into basket and homes, burned it to ward off mosquitoes, and even made music from the husks.

They cooked with it and cleaned their guns with its oil. They boiled it into soap. And when they fermented and cooked it, they distilled a fuel that yielded double the mileage of regular diesel. August Engelhard had been right about coconuts all along. He just never had the tools to make full use of them. If anybody wants to know more about this like real-life avatar, I suggest you seek out a documentary called

the coconut revolution on YouTube, kind of gets into all of this crazy pastoral kind of of steampunk fight. By 1997, despite the blockade and the backing of Australia, P&G hires a bunch of shady South African mercenaries in secret because who doesn't like doing that from time to time? But the New Guinea people find out, they demonstrate against it, P&G's Prime Minister resigns, and the South Africans are held at gunpoint before they can reach Bougainville. incredibly, the rag-tag BRA and its homemade war machine has won and in 2001, peace talks promised autonomy and a referendum on independence within 15 years. To get there, authorities christen an interim group called the Autonomous Bougainville

government, or ABG, which is based in that capital town, Booker. Job done, right? No. Because Francis owner, who is now a war hero venerated like a demigod, he doesn't want to play ball with any of this. In his mind, he won the war, which means he's already won independence, which you can kind of understand. He doesn't need some interim government or a referendum to tell him so.

Owner gathers a bunch of his men, and they seal themselves inside a sprawling no-go zone, complete with roadblocks and armed convoys, which just so happens to coincide with owner's hometown of Guava and Panguna, the massive mine, which is shuttered, but whose copper and gold deposits are still reckoned to be worth $60 billion. By 2004, when owner joins hands with the protagonist of today's show,

he's going around Bougainville on the flatbed of a truck, proclaiming himself the island's king, and he claims he can cure cancer and AIDS, and he shaved off his beard, which some take to meaning that he's going to bit Doolali since the war. Wait, Dulley, that just means like he's gone crazy. He's lost it. And it just because he, like, shaved his beard?

Yeah, they're like, so deeply religious. They're like, he was like Samson and now he's lost it. And he's how I feel. He doesn't have a good chin. I've lost my beard recently, which used to be a fantastic beard, and I feel like I've lost my powers like Samson. I'm so sorry for your loss. Yeah, it's tough, dude. So that is the story of Francis Oner, right?

This incredible warrior and the Bougainville conflict and Panguna. But what about today's protagonist Noah Musinku? Well, he's born in a village in the south of Bougainville, not far from the Solomon Islands in 1964. He says he's the last born child of eight and the last born of the last born of the last born. of the last born, which is part of his own legend. I mean, I couldn't believe, I couldn't like prove that it's complete rubbish, but, you know, you can make your own minds up. Mucinco who gets into Pentecostal Christianity, early doors, which is a fundamental strain of

the religion, but crucially, also preaches prosperity in this life as well as the next. And if you want to know more about how Pentecostalism is wound up with organized crime around the world, I did an episode with the author El Hardy around a year ago, super interesting stuff on like Brazil and the PCC and some of that. It's like wound up with Christianity. Anyway, Moussinku also mixes Christianity up with some more syncretic local ideas. He got sorcery and witchcraft. And he loves telling his school friends tall tales about beggars who became millionaires,

paupers who became princes, and so on. I mean, we all knew a kid like that in school. They were really annoying, right? He even claims his dad was a spy for the Japanese, which is a weird flex. And he brews an invisibility potion so he and a few mates can steal stuff from their school science lab. But when it's shockingly backfires and they get caught, like, ah, the potion needed a few more crow's feathers. I mean, you get the picture, right, he's a fantasist. He's not ordinary. And years later, when he heads to the New Guinea mainland

to study architecture, which is also weird, he gets deep into long distance running, which he sometimes does holding a big wooden stick as if he's a rifle. It's around this time that, according to Mucinke, his father tells him to found a, quote, alternative banking system with very high interest. So it's great advice, Dad. Mucinu says he travels around Australian, even in the US on a fact finder for this amazing new bank, but nothing fits the bill, right? Perhaps because he's not actually looking for a real bank at all, because pretty soon after, his scams kick off in earnest. First, Musinko and his brother Messack tried to insert themselves into the Bougainville peace

process. They try setting both sides this kind of boil in the bag, 10-step program, with the tenth and final step being, shock, a massive payout to them. They call this program Pay-Mure, which means the law of King Pei. And they wind into it this legend that Bougainville was once an Eden-like kingdom called Papala, ruled by a

king called Pei, who also, by the way, ruled the whole world. But over the years, this monarchy had been lost to Bougainvillian custom and colonialism until he, Noamusinku, the last born heir to Pei's throne, had popped up. You got it? Okay. Yeah, kind of. Yeah, all right. All right. Well, the Bougainvillians and a new

Guineans tell Mussinku and his brother to piss off. But they're just warming up to their masterpiece, which is a Ponzi scheme of ridiculous proportions. And the world is about to deal with them a fantastic hand too. This is the late 1990s, when pyramid scams are at their absolute peak. You've got the schemes in the former communist world like Albania and Caritas in Romania, Triple M in Russia, which are roping in millions of people uneducated in the capitalist financial system. We mentioned the Albanian pyramid schemes, I think, a bit. in a couple of episodes we've done on Albanian gangsters and the Coke trade in London. But I think it's, you know, it's interesting to think about, like, they were, you know,

so it's a society that was super closed off for a long period of time. They get, they open up and then right away you have this insane Ponzi scheme that basically bankrupts most of the country. It's very similar, it sounds like, to hear, like, the conditions that allow it for that to, to happen. Yeah, I remember, like, a friend of my, I think I mentioned this in an early show, but like, a friend of mine in Tehrana said they basically ransacked all the army depots, right? So they were running around in like tanks with machine guns in Albania.

It was pretty nuts. And then around the same time, right, the late 90s, you've got this whole host of tax frauds and digital scams is pouncing on the new prevalence of the internet. So remember the two part we did on the Dominion of Melchazetic, the so-called mothership for scammers worldwide? If you haven't already done so, listen to that. It started out as a California penny stock pump and done.

ended up declaring war on France. That is a narrative arc. Madness, it's like they've minted their own fake country, basically, to get cash out of bank loans, bogus passports, diplomatic visas, even mining concessions. Well, there are plenty of these kinds of scams in the Pacific too, especially in Australia, where you have guys calling themselves princes and the heads of micronations.

One of these is a man from Queensland, the state closest to PNG, and he's called Jeffrey Richards, aka Prince Richards of the Kingdom of McGilno. Another is a guy named James Rex Nesbit, who claims to be an envoy of Queen Elizabeth II of Britain. Remember these guys because they are going to pop up again pretty soon. I don't think, no one's going to remember those guys, dude.

I forgot their names already. There's this handy little button on your phone. You can just go back in there and get all these names and really enjoy the podcast a lot more. Sure. Even in the Pacific, no region takes to Ponzi. schemes quite like Melanesia, which is P&G, Solomon's, Nauru, Vanuatu, New Caledonia and Fiji, or those countries you've definitely heard of. For one, these places are like deeply, deeply Christian

in the kind of like hellfire, fire and brimstone way that Mousinco is into. They're incredibly superstitious, but they're all totally full of these remote cloister communities that are susceptible to a phenomenon called cargo cults. This is where folks see something dropping from the sky like a military airdrocks during the Second World War, and they worship it because they assume it's come straight from God. There is an island in Vanuatu whose people, for example, worship the late Prince Philip of Britain. Yeah, the gods must be crazy, right?

I feel like we talked about this two years ago, and I still haven't seen that movie. I still have not seen it either, but yeah, it's like a crazy, crazy topic. I mean, the best one of these is also in Vanuatu, the John From Religion, where people have made up this apocryphal American G.R. called John Frum, which is kind of funny, like, name that you, like, what's a white American name,

John From? Because they've seen the US Air Drops, right? And they wave around American flags and they've got festivals where the men walk in formation, holding fake wooden rifles, just like our boy Musinku once did at college. So nobody in these island nations, right? Nobody's got a clue how banks worked. They're often blinded by displays of wealth to the extent they think it's holy. And then in 1997, there is an Asian financial.

crisis that tanks the region's economy like completely tanks it and a whole bunch of so-called fast money schemes emerge with crazy names like money rain bonanza windfall you know put your money in you get 10 bucks today you get 100 bucks tomorrow kind of thing but none of them go anywhere near as crazy big as you vistract that is musinku's bank and by 1999 he's wrote in tens of thousands of boganvillians new guinians but also so folks in the Solomon Islands, Fiji, even Australians, with promises of 100% payouts. Mucinu preaches a prosperity gospel and he flies around in private jets, which is totally unheard of, and he gets married at a luxury hotel in Port Moresby surrounded by white people like Nesbit and Richards.

Look, it's easy to mock these people, right? But how many of us lost money on crypto? Oh, just me? All right, okay, then. Yeah, we can move on. No, my, my hex is looking great these days. USAA knows dynamic duos can save the day, like superheroes and sidekicks or auto and home insurance. With USAA, you can bundle your auto and home and save up to 10%. Tap the banner to learn more and get a quote at usaa.com slash bundle. Restrictions apply. This is a Bose moment. It's 10 blocks from the train to your apartment door.

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Could be religion, could be language, could be the shared experiences of brutal war, or like in Musinku's case, even though he's spent a conflict in PNG, a combination of all of these things. Bernie Madoff obviously was a master at this, getting in with all those rich bankers in New York. Mucinu takes it even further. He markets himself as Bougainville's first international financier,

and people love it. What does use Vistrak mean? Yeah, I thought that too. And I actually asked the guy about it. Here's what he told me, quote. It's a big vision for the entire universe, not just for Bougainville and not just for PNG. And surely not just for the planet Earth,

nor just for our solar system, nor just our galaxy but this entire universe. And nobody knows the actual size, length, breadth, breadth, height, depth, circumference, or diameter of the universe. Even scientists have tried to see the ends of it with very powerful telescopes, but they cannot succeed. I mean, that just like brings me out in high as man. I hate how this guy talks. He's so fucking infuriating. Anyway, at first, Uvis track pays out some early investors, especially the rich foreigners, right? Just to ram home that cargo cult aspect.

But of course, after a short while, the money dries up. Trouble is, practically everybody in the country has invested. Oh, the bank a dollar, it's your fault, oh, the bank a million, it's the bank's fault kind of thing, only in reverse this time. As Bougainvillians rush to pull their money out, Mucin Pools Abate and Switch. Payouts will only be awarded to Born Again Christians, he says. No adulterers, no drinkers, no smokers.

Oh, and they'll get their money according to, quote, God's will and timing, which is, that's pretty much how my bank works as well. Vistract is gigantic. By 2000, it's taken a quarter of a billion dollars US, probably a lot more. I think some people think it's half a bill. And this is when PNG's entire GDP is 3.5 billion. Later that year, the World Bank moves to freeze Mucinu's assets, which means he now can't pay a single person. And rather than hold his hands up with admit this, Mucinu then doubles down on this Pentecostal stuff. He weaves it into his Conradian tale of Papala, King Pazin, He then starts wearing a crown with king written on it, which is funny, and he says he's the rightful ruler of Bougainville.

Mucinku then goes on the run in the Solomons, which is going through its own civil war, and he tries a version of that shitty ten-step process he tried in Bougainville. They chuck him out, so Mucinu boats it back to Bougainville and heads to his home village of Tonu in the south of the island, close to Panguna, and who does he hook up with? Who else? The father of the nation, war hero extraordinaire. Francis owner. I mean, I got to Musinku last year by going for a guy named Newa,

who's one of his acolytes, calls himself a media envoy. Also says he had Premier League football trials in Manchester, which is a, I don't know, I remember in school, pretty much every kid who could kick a ball, claim to do their trials at Charlton or Palace or whatever, but I'm just going to say, I don't think Newera has ever played or trialled for Man United. And the journey is pretty mad, right?

You travel to Booker via Port Moresby, then you've got to drive hours along the coast to Arrowwall, which is the town the Aussies built to serve the mine. Stay there the night, very nice place, then you've got to drive another shit load up into the jungles, past the roadblock calling itself the Papala border. And that's where I paid some guy at $80 US to get through, and then you're into Panguna itself.

I mean, the places like Chernobyl, if you've ever been there, just huge, broken machinery, gutted buildings, toxic bright blue rivers, roads cracking up. And the pit itself, well, it's a big hole, Danny. It's a very big hole. I love holes. Let's clip that one out. Let's clip that one. I gotta stop. I gotta stop. It's a big hole, yes. It's as far as you I can see.

When I saw it looked like an upturned mine pyramid or one of those step things or one of those hats divo used to wear. And all around there are hundreds, thousands of Bougainvilleans living in shacks and shanties. They're panning for gold with generators and machinery from 50 years ago. Really rudimentary stuff. This is all completely illegal, of course, but these guys, They're mostly dressed in denim shorts and heavy metal t-shirts. Heavy metal was massive on the island, weirdly, thanks to Australians. These guys are rich as hell, and they sell their gold in Booker or Port Moresby. So all these weirdo gold smuggler white guys, you can spot them a mile off,

mostly fat white guys dressed like Steve Irwin getting hammered in the bar. I got to Tonu on the third day, I think it was, and then I had to wait another day to meet the king. And this guy, he looks nuts. Like I said, he wears this British red coat with gold epaulettes and a blue suit. sash. He's got a crown made of cowrie shells that clacks when he talks. He kind of looks like Rick James and Adamant. And he hops around like he does as much coke as they did as well. I managed to get him on record for a total of 26 minutes and then mercifully it ended. And

most of it was complete fucking nonsense. Like the stuff about the U Vistrak name you just heard. And how he wants to deliver sovereignty, but the ABG wants to deliver independence and how they're actually different things and everyone can work together like it's barely intelligible. and it's all woven into this end times religious story, Papala, the King and so on. There's actually science on this kind of speak. It's called Babel Theory. It's basically the people who speak the longest and loudest,

like podcasters, are often assumed to be intelligent. See also politicians and journalists, of course. Here's an extract from my first conversation with him, see if you could make sense of it. Everyone's probably fighting for independence. Yeah. We've been fighting for since over the last 48 hours,

I've 48 years. Yeah. So everything we're doing is for independence. But under the IBG, the party is for just independence. Uh-huh. And in Bekammu, Twin Kindle, the party for sovereignty. There's a big difference between independence and sovereignty. Could you explain to me for a second?

Independence is by grant. Some of it runs it to you. Soventty is by decoration or proclamation. Right. You procreate it and you make it work. It's like it's a unilililess. kind of, you can take your sovereignty. We declared our independence or sovereignty,

and we give to it. Yeah, we're going to do. Just like the US became independent. By its own declaration, England did not grant it to work. It definitely did not. Yeah. Made it work in shape.

Yes. So we under the makeup, we did that. Okay. We declared our independence, so we made it work. Okay. And the sequence of sovereignty. Yeah.

So we started. the gold or mighty. See how annoying that was? Bucinkeu says that he's been busy since that 2006 raid from the Cold Open, preparing for, quote, Explosion 2 of YuVistract, explosion 1 being, of course, the late 90s,

and he spends almost all of his days sitting on an ASA laptop in his throne room, securing potential marks. I mean, he puts in the grind man, there is no denying it. But before we get fully up to the hearing now of this story, let's head back to 2004.

This is when he retreats to Tonu and hooks up with Francis Owner, Bougainville's national icon. You might think Owner would have nothing to do with this chancer, but actually, they're a perfect fit. Mucinu, who's on the run, he obviously gets clout and muscle from Owner, but owner's got a bit Messianic himself

and he's been frozen out of the independence movement. A lot of people think he's a bit of a laughing stuff with all his talk of curing cancer and being the king. So to him, Mucinku rocking up as a chance to inject his image with some much-needed Rasmataz. I think Gen Z call it Rasmataz. Also, half the island is still invested in U Vistract and they believe they're going to get their money back. So Mucinu can offer owner not just money, but access to all these credulous people. So perhaps they'll follow him instead of the ABG and the interim government and its path to

independence. So the pair worked together. Owner by now is called his breakaway guy as the Meccaewee defense force. Mechaumui, meaning holy island, in a local language. And Mousinku calls his part of the no-go zone, Papala, obviously. And he says it's the quote software to owner's hardware, the financial cloud, in other words, the scamming. I mean, the problem with following the escapades of crazy people who just keep naming, giving names and I'll break all this stuff, it's all very confusing. I'm glad.

Yeah, it's a twin kingdom. that makes no sense and his kingdom is the non-physical side of the kingdom so that that doesn't make sense either doesn't it? Not really. Nothing. In May 2004 Mucingu holds this bizarre

coronation ceremony in Guava owner's hometown and he declares the middle age hero quote King Francis Dominic Dataranci Dominar head of state of the royal kingdom of Mecca Muay Here is a brilliant time magazine piece about it quote

Near a village of Guava high in the mountains of central boats Ogdenville, they gathered on a plateau. After a procession of traditional dancers swaying to the music of panpipes, marching militia and strutting chiefs, two men mounted a stage in the centre of the clearing. Bare chested in a floral headdress, grass skirt and neatly clean tan boots, was Francis owner, leader of the region's independence fighters. Alongside him stood one of Papua New Guinea's most notorious conmen, Noah Musinku. It just sounds like Burning Man, but it's like, yeah, it's pretty. clownish, of course, and even one of owner's most formerly trusted lieutenants in the war calls it, quote, bullshit.

But it's a sinister moment, too. As the time article, quote, for more than 14 years, owner and his band of rebels in the Bougainville Revolutionary Army have occupied a no-go zone around the vast Panguna mine. The villagers who fall inside his territory

are denied essential services and face a fragile security situation. Blundering by corporate jet into this dysfunctional society. came an eccentric Australian businessman. His arrival brought hollow promises of multi-million dollar business deals and benign health programs and coincided with Mucinco's growing influence over owner.

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The guy is a very well documented public figure. But for the last few months, Alexei Mosteris at Tortus Media has been digging into a part of his life that is less well known, one that still exists in his shadows. And that's the way he uses private investigators and surveillance to shape the world around him. The story starts with a tip off and ends up charting the way he uses these investigators to target whistleblowers, critics, and even people in his private life. Search for Elon spies wherever you listen to your podcast and follow the feed to make sure you don't miss an episode. Now this businessman is a guy named Simon O'Keefe, but he's an associate of Geoffrey Richards, remember him, Prince

Geoffrey of Mogilno. His presence wows locals about the importance of owner and Mucinco, and some even talk of a trillion dollar investment in Mecca, Muay. Wow, I bet that's going to happen, but he also holds the key to what really may be going on in the no-go zone. Because, on September 30, 2004, Richards, flying a Cessna jet, makes an illegal landing near Arawa with James, Rex, Nesbit, the phony British emissary, and another Australian. Some people think they're carrying guns, but far more likely is that they're in Panguna to get a shit ton of gold and smuggle it to Australia. These guys wind up staying in the no-go zone for weeks. Jeff is not a con man, says Richard's former partner, but I wouldn't want to get on his bad side.

That's nice then. P&G's Interior Minister calls the whole thing a cargo cult, and this is kind of like cuckooing, right? Like when a gang takes over the home or someone old or con. compromise to deal drugs. It's just that when Musinku digs his claws into Francis owner, things go downhill quickly for the old man. His daughter dies by suicide after becoming pregnant to one of owner's old soldiers who had been sleeping with owner's wife as well. In April 2005, Musinku hires the Fujian, former UN peacekeepers, as his personal bodyguards at Tonu, as he fears raids by ABG forces. And he tells them that another 800 more are on their way. God has bigger plans for Bougainville and the region, he writes.

And then in July 2005, Francis owner dies. He's just 51. Mucinu claims owner had promised him all of Mecca Mew just weeks before, which is very useful. So he commandeers owner's defence forces and just takes over the whole no-go zone. Many believe that Richards and Nesbit had actually poisoned owner. And actually there's quite a lot of very influential folks who believe this. But not enough to stand it up in a magazine.

as he not a call like mine. But anyway, now you have this conman and cultist. He's wildly rich, engaging in more schemes and frauds, and he's now sitting on Bougainville's hottest piece of land, Panguna, and he surrounded himself with experienced armed men. And then the king just sort of retreats into himself. Here's another bit for my story, quote. Bucinku quickly grew into the role of Mad King,

spending entire days in his office hammering away at laptop or talking on a satellite phone. His subjects lived by a strange regimen of fasting, church and military drills. Mucinco would emerge only if accompanied by security, his helpers sweeping the ground before him. He would fast for long periods and, when he did eat, allowed only close family members to prepare his meals. He reportedly believed in sorcery, like many. Next comes the May 2006 attacks in which the cop is stabbed, and then there's the November raid from the cold open, which Mucinco escapes. In 2009, he prints shitloads of his own currency, the so-called Bougainville Keena, the Keener is the P&G currency, believing that A, money is just a belief system, which is kind of correct, and that B, whoever controls the currency, will control the island, which, yep, actually that's all also kind of true. It's not a bit mad, because he has put the faces of Jesus Christ, Francis owner, and himself on the bills.

And this is where Mousinku's story kind of peters out. Nobody attacks him. He carries on plot in a second coming for YuVistract on his laptop. A few of the Fijians stick around, actually, today it's just one. He's invested, and he's still looking for his money. I imagine him like that night who guards the Holy Grail in the last crusade. Nobody will kill Musinku, apparently, because then they lose all hope of getting their cash back from him. This is like really common in scams like this. Like people will follow the scammer forever, just they won't lose that hope.

And some of these people who are incredibly poor, they've given Musinku like a grand US. five grand. Some have even given him 20 grand. It's nuts. But actually, the here and now of Mucinu's journey is where it gets juicy again, and not only because I show up and I'm really cool. Because in 2019, Bougainville votes 98% for independence at that long-awaited referendum. Despite it being non-binding, PNG doesn't want another war. Bougainville could become the world's newest nation in 2027, which was the hook that got me the story. But here's the thing. Mucinu is exactly the kind of excuse Port Moresby needs to refuse that independence and the ABG, those interim government guys,

they need the mind to reopen if it has any hopes of building a successful economy. So something's got to give. The catch-22 is that if they go and fuck him up, PNG will say that Bougainville is too violent to be handed independence. If they leave him, they could lose investment or worse, he could quote, pull the trigger on new Vistract again, get crazy rich and try and take over the islands. And here's the bit where it goes mega inception, right?

Because many people think, and I think I agree with them too, that the whole thing, Musinku, Ona, Mecamui, Papala, Yuvis tract, at this point is itself a con, a conspiracy like a red herring, and it's aimed at giving Musinku time enough to siphon as much gold from Panguna as possible before the authorities step in. And that, folks, is the story of no more. Musinku, the island king.

Maybe the craziest comment in the world. Certainly a very fun subject for a magazine story. And it got me to one of the most beautiful places on the planet for a while. So do check out the article at Harper's as I'm pitching them some other wild stuff in New York this week. And if you want to know more, we'll put a massive reading list on Bowenville, fast money schemes on the Patreon. And yeah, mad stuff. Until next week. Pay off your home.

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