Dirty Gold

All that glitters is not gold.

Gold is the new cocaine - and it's just as lucrative, dangerous, and destructive.

Dirty Gold is a searing expose on the booming gold mining industry and destruction on the land and people of Latin America. It looks closely at a small US firm in Miami that helped transform the city into the nation's No.1 importer of gold into the United States.

The book follows the meteoric rise and fall of a group of drug traders known as 'the three amigos' who laundered narco money through gold illegally brought into the US and raked in millions before they were caught. Whilst they were making their millions, the humanitarian situation in Colombia, Peru, and many other countries deteriorated dramatically.

About the Authors

Jay Weaver has covered courts, government and politics for more than 25 years for the Herald. A graduate of UC Berkeley, he was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News in 2001. He and Nicholas Nehamas were also 2019 Pulitzer Prize finalists for a series on international gold smuggling.

Nicholas Nehamas is an investigative reporter for the Miami Herald . He was part of a team that won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting on the Panama Papers.

Jim Wyss is a prize-winning journalist who has spent most of his career living and working in Latin America for outlets like the Economist, the San Francisco Chronicle and Latin Trade. Since 2011, he's been the Miami Herald's South America correspondent based in Bogota, Colombia. He has a master's degree in journalism from Columbia University through the Knight-Bagehot Fellowship, and was also part of the reporting team that won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting for their work on the Panama Papers.

Kyra Gurney is a reporter at the Miami Herald , where she has worked since 2016 and where she helped report an award-winning Panama Papers story exposing ties between Argentine officials and a South Florida real estate empire. Before moving to Miami, Kyra was a reporter at InSight Crime, a non-profit investigative journalism outlet based in Colombia that focuses on organized crime and corruption in Latin America. Kyra has a master's degree in journalism from Columbia University.