A BBC World Service and CBC podcast production.

Hey, guys. I'm Nadia. And I'm Shabaz. We're just popping up with some essential news. The brand new series of Doctor Who has begun. And that means the official Doctor Who podcast is here. Whether you're a Whovian or a Newvian, you are so welcome. This is the place where we dissect every episode, explain all the Easter eggs, and bring you some exclusive content, too. Plus, we'll have fabulous special guests and Doctor Who mega fans. So come and find us. It's the official Doctor Who podcast. Listen wherever you get your BBC podcast.

First, a warning. The following episode contains difficult subjects matter, including references to suicide and death. A man named Michael Deguzmen is standing in front of a hotel mirror. He's getting ready for a night out in a mining town in East Kalimantan, Indonesia. Deguzmen 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 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 The 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 seat belt. 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 Buzang, the The night 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 down draft. 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 now 10:30 AM, 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 light 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 plungees 800 feet into swampy Borneo rainforest, presumed dead. Ten years later, I was sent halfway around the world by the Calgary Herald to investigate Deguzman's death. This story has haunted me ever since. How Was he tied up with the Wild Ride of Breax, 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 Dollar 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 one, The Fall.

Hi, Philippine Airlines welcomes you to Jakarta.

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. 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.

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. It was insisting that you spend it. Normally, it's completely the opposite. All of the restrictions that might have been there from quite an Islamic country weren't there. It was the drinking and the 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 hall house. It was just insane, the whole place. I've never seen anything like it, and I've been around.

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 had as his girlfriends. It was one big rolling party for Mike. Everybody I spoke to was, If you were out with Mike, it 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 mother load, 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 Calimantan 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 Marjorie Banks, spent half his working life mining in the remotest parts of the world.

When you go the panning dish to a goldbearing stream and scoop up a pile of dirt and shake it around, and there's his 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 face with almost built-in scow lines.

Felderhoff was often compared to the movie character Indiana Jones.

He was quite an intimidating guy, actually, particularly with his heavy Dutch accent which was there. And his Dahr-Tacitern character, which he had. No, he was quite a scary 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 Felderhoffs 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.

It 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 McClane'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?

Oh, just somebody who believed, who had almost a mystical character. And I think in geologic terms, it would be someone who has such a connection with the land that they have an almost innate ability to understand where seams of minerals may be present.

In the mid '80s, Felderhoff earmarked a site in a small community called Boosang, deep in the jungle of Calimantan, 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 Calimantan, the land of Hope. Pretty quickly, they came to share their love of geology over beers in the Bush. De Guzman's His 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 Bussang 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 Bussang.

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. Buzang is the last community in a series of river villages. Today, Kalimantan is largely inhabited by the Indigenous Diak people.

The Diaks, they made tremendous guys to 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 Hérald in 2007, 10 years after Michael de Guzman's death, I traveled up the Mahakam River to meet local diaks. I'd never forgotten the intense green stains 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 leaches 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 Bussang.

People who are driven by an enthusiasm that keeps them out trying and trying again And having faith in your idea is because to create an orebody, 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 all body out of nothing. You think it's just something they're 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 had, but you hadn'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.

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.

A web of manipulation and terrifying abuse.

If he'd have said to I knew anything, I would have done it.

With a powerful religious figure at its center.

There was no safe place.

You don't say no to him.

World of Secrets from the BBC World Service investigates allegations surrounding the preacher TB Joshua.

The culture of secrecy needs to be broken.

All episodes of World of Secrets Season 2 are available now wherever you get your BBC podcasts.

David Walsh was an unlikely savior of faltering dreams. He started a small mining company called Bre-X Minerals in 1989. The Bre was for his son, Brett, the X for exploration, Bre-X. Walsh's motto was, If you believe in something enough, you can sell it. But he was never very good at selling part, according to former business correspondent for McLean'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. Breax limped along, barely. By the beginning When he was in 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 Felder off. The timing was perfect. Felderhoff and De Guzman needed to drum up investment for Bussang. Felderhof and Walsh agreed to meet a month later at a hotel bar in Jakarta.

It had been a long time between drinks for those guys. I think it had been some pretty tough projects, and nobody had ever made... They'd never made it, those guys. So this was there. It was almost like their last a chance. But he was a desperado who can pull a rabbit out of the 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 industry like that.

But Walsh wasn't completely sold on Buzang 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 Widdell 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 a 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 Started it off right there.

Walsh's son, Sean, was with him on the trip, supposedly as a graduation present. But Kevin Wendell suspected it was because Walsh needed his 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 Breax. 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 Breax Minerals started right here.

I just remember, it was on one of the main streets of Jakarta, and they had like 100 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 Veldor Hoff in that lobby a few times.

David Walsh, Sean Walsh, and Kevin Wadel stayed at this hotel in Jakarta, the Sare Pan Pacific Hotel. And it's where the meeting took place, where Bre-X and Gold Fever began.

There was an urgency to everything. It was business-like, and they were going to get deal done. That was pretty apparent.

The dinner was a very formal affair. Kevin Wadel 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, dawning 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. Yes, they were all men, with close ties to Indonesian President Suharto.

The very best partner to get was from the top, a member of President Suharto's family. Next best thing would be a general. After that, you'd try and find some super rich 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 Wood Eil remembers there was indeed a pretty big roller present with strong connections to the Indonesian government.

There were some big players, and they were all there to 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 for the rights to explore Bussang for a certain period of time, with Felderhoff 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 Saharto, 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.

We just talked light-hearted about how things were going and the progress being made. 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.

Bre-x 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 Bre-X 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 Bussang and encourage investors to buy Brewerx shares. While Jennifer Wells followed Brewerx for McLean's magazine, she met David Walsh a couple of times.

He decided on the advice 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 set the stage for David Walsh internationally.

And did they find that?

Well, they did. They found it in Fortune magazine. And Richard Bayhar is the one who wrote the fantastic story.

It's Richard Bayhar.

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 Buzang. 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.

On March 20th.

Richard, I hope you got... That's David Walsh.

I hope you got the- He dug them out and has given us permission to use these Bre-X tapes.

Some unanswered questions I have for you now as for item 17.

Three months after the meeting at Sari Pan Pacific, David Walsh, Michael De Guzman, and John Felderhoff were at work exploring the Bussang 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 De 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 Bayhar talking to David Walsh in winter 1997, probing his memory. After his dream, Deguzman phoned David Walsh.

I guess Mike woke up, went to bed thinking about it, woke up in the night thinking about it, went to the Exploration office in in the camp, got the maps of 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 César R. Puzpose, de Guzman's right-hand man and a senior geologist for Breax.

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 this Maradiodream 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?

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 three, gold was detected. Hole four 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 They discovered the motherland.

Now, this is John's best memory on what he said to you when he woke you up from your sleep, 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.

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. 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, Brewerks 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, Brex was valued at $6 billion. People threw their life savings into it. It was heralded as the biggest ever gold discovery. At its height, Brex estimated its Boosang site held almost 80 million ounces of gold. That 8% of the entire world's gold resources.

Well, we heard about Brewerks from reports from the press, and particularly the mining press, and we were all as jealous as hell. Brewerx had found the one we all hoped to find.

The monster was well and truly loose. There'd been nothing like Brewerx. 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 Dollar Gold Scam, The Gold Rush. Everybody was getting in on it and what are we going to get? Everybody wanted to get rich. Everybody was looking at making a quick block. 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 Dollar 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 Story Consultant, Jack Kibble-White. Music and Sound Design by Hannes Brown. Additional Sound Design and Audio Mix by Joel Cox. Executive Editor, Heather Caine-Darling. At CBC, Veronica Simmons and Willow Smith are senior producers. Chris Oak is executive producer. Cecil Fernandez is executive producer, and Arif Nourani is the director. At the BBC World Service, Anne Dixie is senior podcast producer, and John Manell is the podcast commissioning editor. Thanks for listening.

Hey, guys. I'm Nadia. And I'm Shabaz. We're just popping up with some essential news. The brand new series of Doctor Who has begun. And that means the official Doctor Who podcast is here. Whether you're a Whovian or a Newvian, you are so welcome. This is the place where we dissect every episode, explain all the Easter eggs, and bring you some exclusive content, too. Plus, we have fabulous special guests and Doctor Who mega fans. So come and find us. It's the official Doctor Who podcast. Listen wherever you get your BBC podcast.