Every year, the United States Mint sells more than $1 billion of investment-grade gold coins. Each is stamped with an icon like the bald eagle, signifying the government’s guarantee, required by law, that the gold is 100 percent American.
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But a New York Times investigation has found that the government’s program of gold sales is based on a lie. The Mint is actually the last link in a chain that launders foreign gold, much of it illegally mined, for an insatiable market.
The Mint buys gold that originates in a Colombian drug cartel mine. It makes Lady Liberty coins out of gold from Mexican and Peruvian pawn shops and from a Congolese mine that is part-owned by the Chinese government, records show. Some Mint gold has come from a company in Honduras that dug up an Indigenous graveyard for the ore underneath.
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Mr. Cuevas showed us ledger entries on the shop’s computer. His suppliers from La Mandinga, he said, have registered under a Colombian program for small-scale miners, or barequeros. Nearly anyone can get a license, as long as they mine in authorized areas using only hand tools and no mercury.
Of course, La Mandinga’s workers are not mining only with hand tools. Or in authorized areas. And they are using mercury. Mr. Cuevas knows all of this. He mines in La Mandinga himself. But it is not his job to look beyond the paperwork. And the Colombian authorities rarely examine barequero gold’s origins to determine legality.
Instead, they ask one question: Does it have paperwork?
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Gold industry players know how this works. “If you’re buying from barequeros, you’re buying illegal gold,” said the trader Patrick Schein. He said his firm, Gold by Gold, will not buy barequero gold.
The shop where Mr. Cuevas works, like others in town, sells to a government-owned exporter. The exporter said it checks the same database that Mr. Cuevas uses, verifying that the gold is legal. The gold from La Mandinga is mixed with supplies from around Colombia and melted into bars. Export records show that many of them, worth about $255 million over the past year or so, arrive in Texas.
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At a refinery outside Dallas called Dillon Gage, workers dump the imported gold into a glowing cauldron, mixing it with molten gold from other suppliers: South American mines, secondhand U.S. jewelry dealers and Peruvian pawn shops, according to records and interviews.
But to Dillon Gage’s customers, once that gold leaves the Dallas cauldron, it ceases to be foreign. Dillon Gage is in the United States and mixes American gold with Colombian gold. So, the industry logic goes, the end product must be American. “As far as they’re concerned, it originated within the U.S.,” said Terry Hanlon, Dillon Gage’s chief executive.
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A full supply chain audit in the United States would flag the risk of Clan del Golfo gold. Colombian gold is considered high-risk by industry standards, and the U.S. government itself has documented the Clan’s operations in Caucasia, in particular.
But for two decades — a period covering nearly all of the post-Sept. 11 gold boom — the Mint never asked its suppliers where they bought gold, a Treasury Department inspector general audit found in 2024.
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