The sludge king: how one man turned an industrial wasteland into his own El Dorado
When a Romanian businessman returned to his hometown and found a city blighted by mining waste, he hatched a plan to restore it to its former glory. He became a local hero, but now prosecutors accuse of him a running a multimillion dollar fraud
The first time I heard the name Daniel Boldor, I was in Bucharest in a room full of police officers. A discussion about wealthy countries shipping their waste to poorer countries had turned to what Romania – one of the major recipients of Europe’s trash – was doing to fight back. Strict surveillance was being conducted at ports, the officers affirmed, and cargo trucks were undergoing checks. And then one of the policemen asked if I had ever heard the story of Daniel Boldor. For a moment, his colleagues awkwardly scanned the floor with their eyes, as if the officer had made some kind of gaffe. Yes, they seemed to eventually nod in agreement, a sense of enthusiasm overtaking the table. It was an extraordinary story.
It sounded like a fairytale. Some years earlier, hundreds of miles north of Bucharest, deep in the mountains of Transylvania, a Roma man claimed to have discovered a great lost treasure: thousands of tonnes of gold and copper that had been dug up decades earlier, then forgotten. His name was Daniel Boldor, and he had a plan. He found investors across the world. He paid his fellow Roma to gather the metal for him. Then he began selling his treasure. Buyers from South Africa to South Korea proved willing to pay tremendous sums of money for it.
Soon enough Boldor was a very rich man. He also turned out to be more than just an entrepreneur. Over the course of a hard economic decade, in a country that had been pillaged of its natural resources by multinational companies, he became a renegade, Robin Hood in a tracksuit. He took from Romania’s reviled communist past and gave hope to its present. He employed hundreds of Roma who were ferociously loyal to him. He built an empire out of lost gold, and drove the sports cars to prove it.
It sounded like a fairytale because, continued the police officers, it was. They proceeded to tell a second story, one as stupefying as the first. The true story, they claimed, was that Boldor had got rich by selling treasure that never really existed. It was all an intricate con. They pulled out their phones and scrolled through photos of people with shovels standing next to ragged piles of what resembled construction rubble. This is what Boldor was sending, said the officers, jostling their phones in front of me so I could get a better look. According to the officers, Boldor had swindled companies all over the world by taking their money, then shipping them dirt.
And for years, they said, he had somehow got away with it – until 2015, when Boldor’s biggest-ever shipment was busted by Chinese customs officials, who crowbarred open one of the cargo containers of metal he had dispatched, and discovered 20 tonnes of rocky soil inside. Now Boldor was in Romania’s legal crosshairs. On the other side of the country, in the Black Sea port of ConstanČ›a, one of the country’s most dogged prosecutors was attempting to have Boldor convicted and sentenced to as many as 10 years in prison on charges ranging from tax evasion to customs fraud.
So where is Boldor now, I replied at long last to the room of police officers. They shrugged. No one could really say.
A few days later I boarded a 12-hour night train from Bucharest to Transylvania to try to find him....
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