How We Traced U.S. Government Gold to a Drug Cartel

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How We Traced U.S. Government Gold to a Drug Cartel

Three reporters followed supply chains to reveal that the U.S. Mint buys gold that comes from foreign pawn shops and drug dealers, then claims it is from the United States.

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The reporter Justin Scheck of The Times at La Mandinga, in Colombia. It’s a government-owned cattle ranch where illegal miners tear up the earth.

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Federico Rios for The New York Times

By

Justin Scheck

Justin Scheck traveled with his colleagues Federico Rios and Simón Posada to the heart of Clan del Golfo country, where the most surprising thing they found at a cartel-run gold mine was a breeding operation for top-notch fighting roosters.

April 26, 2026,

5:02 a.m. ET

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Almost three years ago, I became obsessed with gold.

I’d been watching the price shoot up for two decades. By December of 2023, gold was an eye-watering $2,000 an ounce, inflated by the anxiety of wealthy investors and governments. They worried about terrorist attacks and wars and financial instability and, lately, disease. Gold, they reasoned, would hold its value if stocks and bonds and dollars lost theirs.

At the same time, I’d been reading about illegal gold mining devastating the Sahel across Africa and the Amazon rainforest. It was fueling terrorist attacks and wars and financial instability and lately, researchers were learning, disease.

I’ve spent much of my career writing about money and power, and the intersection of great wealth and deep poverty. I’m fascinated by the consequences of actions that wealthy institutions take to become wealthier. And I’m always looking for stories about how the choices made in rich countries affect people in poor ones. So I told my editor, Matt Apuzzo, that during this price run-up, I wanted to report on gold mining.

He was skeptical and asked what turned out to be the big question: Is the hoarding of gold to avoid instability and violence actually creating more instability and violence?

If banks and the U.S. government — the biggest, most credible suppliers of gold to investors — are buying the same gold that originates with, say, a terrorist group, he said, we would have a story.

By the end of that day, I was pretty sure that we would

not

have a story.

Big companies that sell gold to investors in the United States and Europe have seemingly ironclad policies to avoid buying gold that was criminally mined. And federal law requires America’s most reputable gold seller, the United States Mint, to use only U.S.-mined gold for its investor-grade coins. A Mint spokesman told me early in my reporting that it buys only U.S. gold.

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