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. Well, the first trip that I made out there was a familiarization trip. We needed to do some work. We needed to find out what exactly was going on, just to get a feel for the place and to meet the people.

Dave Potter was a geologist with Freeport, a big US mining company. He wanted to check out the mine site in case Freeport made a deal with Freex. He choppered out to Busset.

When I got off the helicopter, I looked at the camp, and the camp was pretty well squared away. I was pretty impressed with the job that they'd done. It was obviously a camp that they'd been in for a while, and they turned it into a home, if you will. There was a lot of busyness around camp, people coming and going. The first night we had dinner together, and as geologist will, we drank too much beer and told lies to each other, which was a good start.

And things on the ground looked good, at least at first.

When I first went out there, I was fairly happy that, yeah, this looked like a typical exploration effort and it's something that we had seen before and would see you again. And this was a good start.

He spent some time with the two men at the heart of the Breax operation.

John Felderhoff was there, Michael D. Gußmann, but he was really quiet, and he came in and out. We had a good meal together and spent a lot of time talking about the geology and the deposit. And John spent a lot of time telling us how it was the greatest thing since slice bread. And I remember John told us about his birthday present at that point in time. His wife had bought him a, I think it was a Lamborghini, and he was quite excited about that and showed us pictures of it. So we had... It was an interesting evening.

Then, Dave Potter asked to look at the gold, core samples taken from the mine.

That's exactly right. I wanted to look at some of the core that was in the sheds there. I was a little disappointed because there wasn't a lot of core. Most of the core that they had came from the initial, the early drilling that they had done. I was somewhat surprised that they didn't have more examples of what they were drilling because they just drilled thousands of meters of rock, and I was surprised that there wasn't more core available to look at.

Not a huge red flag for Potter, but something felt a little off. Still, this was one of the largest gold deposits in history. Freeport wasn't the only mining company focusing their attention on the discovery. A fight was brewing. Huge money was at stake, and some powerful people were willing to do whatever it would take to get their hands on it. I'm Suzanne Wilton, and 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 3, The Battle for Buzang. So I'm walking down this beautiful street, which has an incredible canopy of trees and vines and towering palms. This is Chindana Street, and it's the heart of Jakarta power and wealth. It's also the home of the Suharto family. On my left, I'm passing Suharto's house. It's bright lime green with clay roof and quite spread out, multiple cars in front and, of course, security at the front of the house. And this is in the heart of Jakarta, the heart of the business district, and the seat of government just streets away.

There are rumors in this area that there are tunnels underneath these houses that connect them together. And you can just imagine the intrigue and the deals done behind these closed doors. I wonder if Mike De Guzman or John Felderhoff or others walked these streets in making a deal with Suharto family over the players buying for a piece of the pie.

Everything went through Suharto. And what I mean by everything is you could not do business there unless you go through Suharto. So he literally had very ironclad control over the whole country.

Richard Jacobson worked for a private investigation company in Hong Kong and was based in Indonesia. He's no stranger to intrigue. Before he started working in private investigation, he was a CIA agent.

You couldn't do anything there without the Saharto blessing it. And it was very centralized.

So what did that mean for Brex as this company started to skyrocket and the projections got bigger and bigger.

It obviously meant that it came with Suharto's attention, and that's when the Suharto family He came involved with Brex.

Suharto came to power in 1967. He was complicated and charismatic. He boosted the economy, opening up the country to foreign investment. But his rule was known for widespread corruption and repression, and some say even worse. One interview that stuck with me was with Simon Simbiring, the former Director General of the Mining Department in Indonesia. He told me that speaking out about what he saw going on behind the scenes at the time could have been deadly.

I should be honest to you, I I'm afraid to tell somebody about this.

They can kill me.

Money is very, very dangerous.

Okay, so actually, we'll start by just asking you to give your first and last and what your role was with Brewerx.

Hi, I'm Brian Coates. I was Vice President and Corporate Controller at Brewerx.

Brian Coates joined Brewerx in July 1996. Almost straight away, he found himself thrown into an escalating situation in Indonesia.

I mean, the nickname of Mrs. Suwardo was Mrs. 10%. What did that mean? That didn't talk about how much tips she left when she went to the restaurant was how much ownership she would have in ventures.

Bending off the Indonesian government was always going to be difficult. But Brewerks had an added problem. Their mining permit for Buzang was set to expire. When it did, Suharto brought work to a grinding halt. Brewerks did not own the rights, known as a title to the land in Buzang, the Indonesian government did. If they wanted another permit, Breaks was told it needed to share the mine with another company, and this company would be chosen by the government. This company would then send money to Suharto. The best Brex could hope for was to influence the company chosen and to keep a decent percentage of the mine. That's when Peter Munch enters the story. Munch had built his company, Barrick Gold Corporation, up from nothing into the biggest gold business in the world. Sensing an opportunity, he made his way to Jakarta and took over the whole top floor of one of the city's five-star hotels. Exploration geologist Jim Richards was based in Jakarta during this time.

Their sole mission was to hunt down John Felderhoff and do the deal.

He was doing the sweetener job on Tommy Sahado.

Peter Monk was moving heaven and earth to get John Felderhoff into his office.

He wasn't the guy that you could say no to either, particularly in Indonesia with Tommy Sahado next to you.

So John Felderhoff, he had gone to ground, and you couldn't find him for love nor money. Nobody knew where he was. And that was the crazy environment that was going on in Jakarta at that time. People were hunting people and looking for people, and have you seen him?

And it was like that. Munch liked to pepper his speeches with sayings. One of his favorites was, quote, Life is about meeting objectives. Sometimes your objectives cross other people's. Then you have to fight and fight to win. As Brewerke's new vice President, Brian Coats was to negotiate with the Indonesian government and Barrick Gold.

Right away, we were right in the middle of discussions. Barrick had expressed interest, and the dance started.

And when you talk about the dance, who was leading?

The leading candidate to be was Barrick.

And these are very sophisticated players. We're talking Peter Munch with political leaders. How did that stack up against David Walsh?

So obviously, Barrick had probably the best group of people around the table advising Mr. Munch at that point in time, former Canadian Prime Minister, Mulrune, was on the international committee and on the board. George Bush, former President Bush, the father, was an advisor to the company and a number of other prominent an worldwide businessman.

Barrack had gotten one of their board members, former US President George Bush senior, no less, to send a letter to President Suharto, recommending he do the deal with them.

Can we just try to connect to Munch now. Sure. Just a second. Hang in. Okay. Mr. Munch, are you there? I'm speaking. I'm here. Rich? Yes. Hello. Hello there. How are you doing? How are you, Mr. Munch?

Journalist Richard Bayhar, who shared the Brewerke's tapes with us, kept a recording of an hour-long interview with Barrett Golds Peter Munch, in which Munch talks about his fight for Bre-X. In the archive interview, Monk was keen to play down the influence of Bush's letter.

But to me, it was a childish thing to assume that a multi-billion dollar project, a project of this importance to the national economy of Indonesia, will be determined or given or not given by a letter, an expensident's rights to somebody. I mean, that's a childish thing. What does Bush get paid to be on your international board? Nothing.

Munch was annoyed that people latched onto this one letter thinking it would be powerful enough to win him the mind. He didn't just rely on letters. Munch went directly to the Indonesian government, hoping hoping to get to the front of the queue. He started to play the game from the smart end, the Indonesian end, getting inside the politics of an authoritarian regime.

I would say it was intense on the side of Barrick. Barrick had lined up some support and some discussions. So that was a challenging aspect there was there.

What was challenging about that?

Well, Barrick We certainly had some relationships with the Minister of Mind, Sujanan, and one of his advisors, Ganto, who was in the background and a fixer. But there was a lot of controversy. There's also a rumor to have been some dinners in Toronto where the Minister of Mind was there receiving letters from Barrack and also expressing interest to the government of Indonesia that they would like to participate state in the development of this world-class our body.

So they were trying to secure their position.

Certainly means by which we were not used to play.

In Richard Bayhar's interview with the late Peter Monk, he brings up a dossier that Barrack allegedly handed to the Ministry of Minds.

A dossier? Yeah. About four inches of documents to the Ministry. And this was information that was damaging to Brewer. And I spoke with an official at the Ministry about this who reviewed it, and the official believes that this was done to harm Brewerks. Done by who? By Barrack. He said it was none of Barrack's business. Why in the world did they come in here, dropped this material off? He said that if you want to submit stuff like this, put into a formal report. And I said, Why do you think this was done? He said, The intention was to hurt Breax and to harm Breax's relationship with the government. I was said, but I have no idea about that. Okay.

In November 1996, Munch's offer to Breax was a 75-25 split, not in Breax's favor. This was alarming to Breax. Munch knew that nepotism was the most effective way to win favor with the Indonesian government. So Barak built an alliance with Suharto's daughter, Tultu. Peter Munch tells Richard Bayhar that he was prepared to use any contact he could to gain access to the decision-makers.

I think there was a lot of anger They felt that, and there's been a lot of criticism, that Barrack ingratiated itself with the Ministry and basically placed itself at the forefront by hiring the daughter of the dictator there. No, no, no, no, Richard. Now, come on. No, no, no. You don't ingratiate yourself by hiring a daughter. You ingratiate yourself. We weren't selected. You damn right, I ingratiate myself. If I got to sell, we discovered that BX was not the owner of that deposit. And we discovered that... I mean, we built our company by doing bids. And for first time in our life, we discovered it was a billion or two billion or three billion dollar company who did not own the deposit which the shareholders absolutely were convinced they owned. The title did not belong to them. Well, Christ, who owns the title? Well, the title belonged, lo and behold, according to all the lawyers we sent there. To the government. Okay, but it's not unusual for a junior mining company to find things in that country when they have... Well, they had a pending application. They had Exactly. We had the default. There was no title to the deposit.

And no analyst ever highlighted that fact. But what was your thinking? Why was your next step to hire Hartarto and Tuttut? I'm just wondering what was the thinking The thinking was that if you want a gold mine and you find that the company you thought owned it does not own it, and you find out that Mr. X owns it, you go to Mr. X. But Mr. X, in this case, was a government. And we hired anybody we could. We had, I don't know, 18 people there who could help us get to the highest level of government. Because if they don't own it, you want it. No, no, no, no, no. It was clear by the statements of B. X that they did not have the financial wherewithal, their plan was to auction. We did absolutely everything in our power to sell ourselves to the owner. And the owner was the government. And the mining minister was in Canada. And we looked around, and I personally looked around, and I mobilized every contact I had, from the banking contacts to the government contacts, to put me in touch with people who can get me to the highest level of the government so I can make my pitch at the highest level.

It seems that Brewerx felt they had no choice but to strike back.

One of the good parts of the story is, I I think, how Brewerx stood up to large corporate companies that had connections, and we fought back. And so we played pretty hard.

How did that and what did that look like?

At one point in time, we hired President Suardo's son. And I think the credit to that goes from the people that were working at Brewerke at the time, from the advisors that were involved. If this is going to be debated at the dinner table on Sunday or Saturday night, we'll get a seat at the table. I guess that was our response.

Hiring Suharto Sansige as a consultant would turn out to be a master stroke by Brewerks, but it didn't seem like that at first. Brewerks going toe to toe with Barrick in the nepotism stakes, raised the ante. Intel that could help Barrick secure a deal became very valuable.

They knew more about us than we knew about ourselves. And that was not just corporately, that was individually. How did they do So they would do by investigating us. There's various incidents that happen. They were par for the course. Barrick had hired Croll and Associates out of New York, very prominent private investigators.

With so much at stake and private investigators swarming like flies around Breax, paranoia set in. And the paranoia wasn't helped by Walsh claiming there had been a break-in at his Calgary office, and two weeks earlier, his wife finding someone rifling through the garbage, all prompting Walsh to send a memo advising employees to shred sensitive materials. This only increased Brian's paranoia.

I suspect that they had access to our documents. There's rumors that they were going through our garbage and so on and so forth.

In 2001, it was disclosed that Barrick had obtained sensitive internal Bre-X documents via Kroll Associates. How the documents reached Kroll was never explained. They could have been leaked, of course, but these were unprecedented times. We contacted Barrick Gold and Kroll and put these allegations to them, but they declined to comment. However, in the Brewerks tapes, Richard Bayhar asks the late Peter Monk about claims that Barrick hired private detectives to investigate Brewerks' senior executives.

One of the things that I think upset the Brewerke's people was that Barrack had enlisted private detectives to- I don't know what you're talking about. No, you don't. But I don't know what you're talking about. To get the appointment?

At this point, Richard Bayhar had already spoken with Randall Olafont, who at the time was Barrack's chief financial officer.

I spoke to Olafont. He confirmed it. What did he have? That Barrack's Attorneys used private detectives. On whom? To dig up information about Bre-X and about Bre-X executives. And I'll tell you, these private eyes- But I have never seen information from Bre-X executives from private detectives, ever. Never. Private detectives- On Bre-X executives? Showed up at Bre-X executives' homes in Canada and in the Philippines. To do what? Talk to their families. To do what? To try to find out who these people were. When we tried to make the bid? I'm sorry. At the time, we tried to make the bid? This is during the spring and the summer and even into the fall of 1996. Richard, I have never, never used, seen, or heard or would care what Roli Franciscoo's private life is about. Never. I don't know how that could help me or hinder me.

Bre-x's Chief Financial Officer, Roli Franciscoo, who was leading negotiations at the time, had also spoken about experiencing suspicious activity.

Roli says that every time he went home to Canada, there would be a van staking out his home. I'm afraid that is something I have absolutely zero knowledge of. I would never have authorized, and I'm not aware of it. Oliphant said to me that they wanted It's standard procedure during takeovers. Yes, in February. We called the takeover off in February. Why did the private eyes continue into the- I don't know. Believe me, I called the shots here. Do you think- Because I told my board, if anybody is responsible for this failure, it's Peter Munch. Do you think you could inquire about this?

I have no interest. It wasn't just allegations of private investigators doggedly following the story. Investigative journalists did their fair share of digging as well. In fact, any break-ins and rifling through garbage could have been one of many other interested parties. Investors and analysts were also desperate for intel. It was like the Wild West, and rumor and speculation was part and parcel of such crazy times. Brian was already suspicious of private investigators used during hostile takeover bids.

We knew how they worked, and we were also advised that they were working against us at that point in time.

So was this surprising to you?

Everything is surprising, I guess, in the Bre-X story.

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 Oficial 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 funds.

So come and find us. It's the official Doctor Who podcast. Listen wherever you get your BBC podcast.

To compound Brewerke's stresses, the Indonesian government let it be known that if the Barak deal went through, they would be taking a 10% share, leaving Barak with 67.5% of the mine, and Brewerke's, a measly 22.5%. For a time, the Indonesian government looked to be hot on this deal and tried to force a shotgun marriage between Brewerks and Barrick. The Brewerke's inner circle, Walsh, Felderhoff, and de Guzman, were appalled.

If you look at the Brewerke story, nobody enjoyed the way Barrack was playing the game. So there was a lot of animosity against Barrack at that point in time. John, being the colorful person that he was, highlighted comments that the closest thing that Mr. Monk had been to Rocks, which was a scotch in the Rocks. So we fight today and we're friends tomorrow. You also got to remember that this was war.

You've described it very much as the story of David versus Goliath. Why Why?

It was David and Goliath, where you had us as a small company, fighting off larger companies that did pretty well to stay in the game.

Suharto's son, Siget, who was still battling for Bre-X, gave them what was to become a very valuable bit of advice. He told them to bring Suharto's right-hand man, Bob Hassan, to the table. Andrew Neil was an observer to the war between Barrack and Brewerks when he worked for the mining company, Freeport.

Well, this is delving into the realm of soap operas.

Andrew saw the conflict break out in Suharto's family and with other companies who were trying to muscle their way in by making overtures to more of Suharto's kids.

Suharto's family were known as the Chindana family because of location of their complex. They all lived together in this massive complex. They still do to a certain extent. Barrack were lobbying the Chindana family and had put a couple of the children on retainers. Placer, they retained a couple of the other children to lobby on their behalf. And historically, the Chindana family would have supper together just about every day. The kids were fighting in front of dad and mom, to the point that there was a real split coming in the family.

The Tsuut‘s were in meltdown. The children were bickering over Bussang, each one bagged by a different mining company. Barrick had the powerful eldest daughter Tutu advising them. Breax had Siget, and now Placer Dome turned the heads of yet two more. The President needed to find a way out before his family went into freefall, he needed wise counsel. He needed Mohamed Bob Hassan.

So my understanding is Bob Hassan, who was a close advisor to Saharto and also a very good friend of Freeborn, said to Saharto, You're going to have to resolve this. This is ridiculous. And Suharto asked for his input, and he said, Quite frankly, you need to give it to a third party.

Somewhere within this dogfight, Bob Hassan, an Indonesian timber tycoon and Suharto's closest confidante, not to mention his golfing buddy, spotted a golden opportunity. There was a way here he could engineer his own slice of the Buzang mine. Richard Behar and David Walsh in the Breax tapes.

Let me jump back to Hassan. You had to repair your relationship even before you met him. He had heard things about you? Well, I think everyone in Indonesia had preconceived ideas from the disinformation campaign. Do you know what he had heard? No, but I'm sure I didn't pay much attention to it, but I just knew that the perception of me and Breax as a company was very poor.

During the battle for Boosang, Barrack discredited projects, and Bob Hassan got wind of this, which could be a huge problem for the company. Anyone who wanted in on the deal needed Hassan on their side.

He was the guy that carried the bag for the President. He was the man that the President would send out to make sure that he got what he wanted.

That's David Potter again, Freeport's chief geologist who carried out the due diligence at Boosang.

So Bob had a lot of power behind him. He had the President's ears, so people treaded very lightly around him.

But there were other reasons for treading lightly.

I don't know that I'd want to cross Bob Hassan. The rumor had it that he was somebody that had the connections that he could make people disappear.

Luckily for Breaks, Barak's relationship with Bob Hassan wasn't much better. Hassan and Barrick CEO Peter Munch had never been the best of friends, and then Munch made a wrong move. During a meeting, Munch had put his hand on Hassan's knee. Munch was very tactile and would use endearments like darling to address people he didn't know very well. Placing his hand on Hassan's knee was a cultural faux pas, allowing for personal space in Indonesia is a sign of respect. Along with Hassan's dislike for Barak's strategy, Monk's apparent lack of respect was the final straw for Hassan. Barak was ruled out as a contender. Enter, Freeport. The US mining giant had already made one huge gold find in another area of Indonesia, and Suharto liked the company's CEO, a man named Jim Bob Moffet, a former American football player and larger than life, Elvis-impersonating Texan with a reputation for getting what he wanted. Importantly, Bob Hassan liked him, too. Things moved fast now, maybe because this was the deal Hassan had always had in mind. He helped close it for Freeport.

Suddenly, it dropped in Freeport's lap, and I think it was really not totally voluntary. I mean, it was assigned, and Moffet said, Okay, we'll do it.

That's Dan Bowman. He was a vice President at Freeport, and Jim Bob assigned him to sort out the details of the Bre-X transaction.

Suharto, when he wanted to do something, he would write in the margins of letters, like from ministers. They were called dip notes. And basically, the The dip note would say, Do this, and then it would go down through the chain of authority. And Bob Hassan showed me the dip note. That was the appointment. And Moffett couldn't refuse that.

You don't defy the President. No, no.

Bad idea.

Jim Bob Moffet was another person it was best not to defy.

Moffet and Suharto had a very close relationship. They had similar personalities. They didn't like underlings who expressed doubts about their vision. Moffet always said, Are you boys ready to fight an adventure whenever you would have a new thing to do? Which I thought was a great way to put it.

He sounds like he was an incredible character.

He was really something. He was really, really something. And he scared the hell out of most people. I thought he was one of the funniest guys I ever met because he had this sense of presence, and he would mess with people. And if you didn't see the humor in the situation, you'd think, Oh, my God, this guy is dangerously unbalanced.

So with freeport in, what did that mean for Breax? A meeting was organized with all the interested parties. This was Breax's chance to try and rescue as much as they could out of the situation.

I was called to a meeting at Bob Hassan's house on February 14th, Valentine's Day, 1997, and At the meeting were Jim Bob Moffet and also Bob Hassan. And there was a guy there named Roley Francisco, who was the CFO, newly appointed CFO of Brex. And the purpose of the meeting was to find out how we were going to split the ownership of BreX between the various parties. So we walked in and Mr. Moffet was a larger-than-life character, he was very colorful, and he was a no-nonsense guy. We had about 10 seconds of small talk, and he said to Raleigh Francisco, What do you want? Raleigh Francisco said, Well, Jim Bob, we want $100 million in cash for this transaction. Without missing a beat, Moffett said, This could be salted. Get up, boys. We're leaving.

Wow. Salting is the process of adding gold to a drilling sample to make it look like there is more gold than there is. There's a chance that Moffett had concerns about the validity and the scale of the Bre-X find. But more than likely, this was just a negotiation tactic.

We said, Okay, because you never said no to Moffet. And he got up and he walked out and we trailed behind him. Bob Hassan, who was at the meeting, was shocked, and he was trailing behind Moffet asking what's going on. And Mr. Moffet got in car and drove away. And I went home bewildered. And at about one o'clock in the morning, Mr. Moffet called me and he said, I know what these people want. They don't think we have the money. So I called my friend at Chase Bank and I got a billion dollars. You go tell those guys we have the money.

Bob Hassan, Jim Bob Moffet, and Breax eventually came to a deal on Valentine's Day, 1997. Breax's sole ownership of Buzang would be no more. The mine was to be split three ways: 45% to Brewerks, 40% to Indonesia, and for $100 million, 15% to Freeport. In the Brewerks tapes, David Walsh spoke to Richard Behar shortly after the deal.

Did you feel that in a way this deal was also forced on you, David? But you didn't really have a choice in the end. Hassan said this is the way it's going to be. Well, as I said in my press release the other day-No, but help me be-Okay, no, but what I said is exactly the truth. The other day, I said, Other companies Actually, I wasn't allowed to say what I wanted to say. I toned down the press release. But other companies didn't discover it, never spent a dime, carried on negotiations without including us. I mean, did Freeport do a lot of the negotiating without you at the table? No. They were called in at the last minute. My son had a talk with Jim Bob and then asked for our okay, and I immediately gave it. And the guys at Freeport have a real passion for what they do like we do. They're really energized, to quote Jim Bob.

Really energized is right. Freeport, we're thrilled. Paul Murphy from Freeport remembers Jim Bob's announcement to the company's Jakarta office.

It was Valentine's Day. I remember that, February. I think it was '97. Our chairman, Jim Bob Moffet, called us all together in the Jakarta office and said, Hey, guys, I've got a Valentine's Day present for you. I've just struck a deal with Bob Asan in Bre-X. We're going to design, develop, and operate this fantastic gold deposit But in Kalimantan. It's going to be a change for us, but we have the ability to pull it off. He made it clear from the very beginning, not as an afterthought, but what he made the proviso, of course, we've got to do our due diligence. And he turned to Dave Potter who was the senior exploration geologist at the time, and said, Dave, I want you to immediately start this afternoon, get yourself organized, and I want you to start drilling twin holes in the Bussang deposit.

In gold exploration, twinning is a way to check the validity of drilling results. If someone says they have found gold in a particular spot, then you drill a hole right next to it so you can test the sample for traces. If they really found gold, then so should you.

So Dave's job was immediately to set up a drill rig and start drilling in the top 10 or 20 richest core samples to drill a hole within a few feet of the original hole to try to duplicate the results. So everybody was very excited. This was going to be a new chapter for us.

Freeport had sent Dave Potter out to Buzang once before. But as he prepared to go again, some of the things he'd seen on the last trip were giving him cause for concern. Before, Freeport handed over $100 million to Breax, they needed to be sure what they were getting into. Dave shared his concerns with Jim Bob Moffet.

I was a little concerned about the lack of core, and he said, Yeah, okay. And then I said, Well, I think we should drill what I call scissor holes, which we'd get into the line of the cross-section that they'd drill and drill back at an angle in both directions so that we would intercept at least four of the drill holes that they'd been working in. And he'd said, Well, that may be too much because we want to make this move a little faster. And I said, I really think we ought to do it, Jim Bob. And he finally said, Sure. Okay, go ahead, do that. If he really didn't think it was a good idea, he wouldn't let me do it.

Dave quickly assembled a team of geologists to take out to Boosang, including Exploration Manager, Joe McPherson.

We had our first introduction to the Breax guys just up the street from the former freeport office, which was across from the Australian Embassy. At the time, And it was at 10:00 in the morning. I remember this very clearly because we all chuped up there. We're chuffed, we're ready to go. And we went in there and there was a bunch of Breax guys there. Deguzum was there, Felderhof was there. And Out came the beer right away, 10:00 in the morning. So we're all going to look at it. Okay, now what do we do? That's a fact. And we had a couple to be polite, but we bailed pretty early at that time because we felt it wasn't really the right environment to be talking about how we were going to structure the actual due diligence itself.

So you were there to talk about due diligence for what could be the biggest potential mine in the world, and their cracking, Bintang?

Yeah, they were cracking the beers at 10:00 in the morning. They were very laid back, very confident. There was no sign of anything that was a miss. They were really excited themselves and looking forward to being partners with Freeport. And it was a good meeting. We were just a little bit taken aback by the bin tanks on the table at 10:00 in the morning.

What was your first impression of Mike De Guzman and John Felderhoff?

Michael De Guzman, very quiet, very quiet, soft-spoken, didn't say much, clearly knew his geology. John Felderhoff, I would tag more as a promoter type. John was the main spokesman. He did most of the talking, and you can tell that he had been in the business for many years. After the first meeting, we have circled the wagons again and had a bit more of a discussion, planned our strategy and said, Well, we clearly are going to have to push this ourselves. There's nothing that can be hidden. So we went into it with that attitude that we were going to ask any question that we thought we had to and ask for data whatever is necessary to prove the viability of the deposit from a technical standpoint.

After Barrick, Brewerks were going to have a hard time trusting another major mining company, and they were very aware that Freeport might try to cast doubt on the find to drive down the price. Before Dave Potter left Jakarta for Buzang, Simon Simbiring from the Indonesian Ministry of Mines reminded him of the responsibility resting on his shoulders.

I said to Potter, This is professional. No hanky-panky, because this is very, very sensitive. Money is very, very dangerous.

Sembeering, of all people, knew just how high the stakes were. Up until now, Breaks had been able to maintain a tight hold over Buzang. But with the Indonesian government now directly invested and Freeport on their way to scrutinize Veldraff and de Guzman's work, this was to be the critical moment. If anything were to go wrong, if there was to be any question over the mind's value, well, then things would go south very, very quickly. Next time on the 6 billion gold scam. Things start to feel weird at the Buzang site.

Just got quiet. Start getting this a creepy feeling. Something just isn't right. And That's when things started to get interesting for us. People started disappearing. De Guzman disappeared.

The story of the Breyack's fortune begins to unravel.

So I'm sitting on the side of my in the room of the Royal York, and so I'm holding a six billion dollar secret in my hand.

The six 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 Rickerts. Story Consultant, Jack Kibbel-White. Music and Sound Design by Hannah 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 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.