It sounded like a fairy tale. A few years earlier, hundreds of miles north of Bucharest, deep in the mountains of Transylvania, a Roma claimed to have discovered a great lost treasure: thousands of tons of gold and copper that had been mined decades earlier and then forgotten. His name was Daniel Boldor and he had a plan. He found investors all over the world. He paid his compatriot Roma to collect the metal for him. Then he started selling his treasure. Buyers from South Africa to South Korea proved willing to pay huge sums of money for it. Soon Boldor became a very rich man. He also proved to be more than just a businessman. During a difficult economic decade, in a country that had its natural resources plundered by multinational corporations, he became a renegade, tracksuit-wearing Robin Hood. He took from Romania’s abusive communist past and gave hope to its present. He employed hundreds of Roma who were fiercely loyal to him. He built an empire out of lost gold and drove the sports cars to prove it. It sounded like a fairy tale because, the police continued, it was. They proceeded to tell a second story, just as shocking as the first. The true story, they claimed, was that Boldor had gotten rich by selling treasure that never actually existed. It was all an elaborate scam. They took out their phones and scrolled through pictures of people with shovels standing next to ragged piles of what looked like rubble. This is what Boldor was sending, the officers said, holding out their phones in front of me so I could see better. According to officers, Boldor had defrauded companies around the world by taking their money and then sending them soil. Daniel Boldor in Fersig, Romania. Photo: Alex Clapp And for years, they said, he had somehow gotten away with it — until 2015, when Boldor’s largest shipment in history was destroyed by Chinese customs officials, who opened one of the cargo containers of metal he had shipped and discovered 20 tons 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 Constanta, one of the country’s toughest prosecutors was trying to sentence Boldor to 10 years in prison on charges ranging from tax evasion to customs fraud. Where is Boldor now, I finally answered in the cops room. They shrugged. No one could really tell. A few days later I boarded a 12-hour night train from Bucharest to Transylvania to try to find him. Tucked away near the borders of Ukraine and Hungary, the town of Baia Mare lies at the northern tip of Transylvania, amid a rolling carpet of tawny farmland that gives way to snow-capped mountains. On my first morning in town last year, the head of its environmental police informed me that Daniel Boldor was not in Baia Mare, and probably not even in Romania, for that matter. But only a few hours later, the owner of a local pawn shop told me he knew Boldor and called him. After telling Boldor that I was a journalist, he handed me the phone. Certainly, said Boldor, he was at Baia Mare and free to meet. He could also get me an interview with the mayor of the town if I was interested. A short, wiry man with intense brown eyes and a thin voice, Boldor met me at The Buffet, a cafe located – as Boldor pointed out on our first day together – on the same street as the city’s police headquarters and the courthouse. of the county. During my next few weeks in Baia Mare, Boldor spent much of his time at The Buffet. Along with nine companies and properties across Romania, as well as an apartment in Dubai and shares in a Swiss ski resort, he claimed to own it. Most days he would enter the coffee shop in the early afternoon, usually dressed in dark sweatpants and a hooded parka, and head to a corner booth, where he would spend the next few hours talking on his phone with practiced fatigue, occasionally entertaining himself with questions about who he was. and why he had problems with the police. Nicolae Ceaușescu with a worker in a metallurgical factory in Resita, 1970. Photo: Interfoto/Alamy His story began rather unexpectedly. In 2001, aged 24, Boldor left Baia Mare for west London and began working in the building trade. His first job involved demolishing bathrooms and kitchens around Harrow and Notting Hill. He spoke little English at the time and shared a dirty apartment with a handful of other Romanians. Once he had saved £15,000, he set up his own construction company. By 2007, he had summoned his four younger brothers from Romania and assigned them to his construction sites across the UK, which he began to fill with electricians from Eastern Europe and masons from Ireland. Boldor climbed up quickly. Only a few years after dismantling kitchens in Notting Hill, he was overseeing the refurbishment of a 100-room hotel, the Enterprise in Earls Court. “There was no problem with Daniel,” Ben Regeb, a Tunisian marble seller who supplied Boldor with material for his construction work on Harrow Central Mosque in 2010, told me. Boldor gave little of himself. “In the construction industry you don’t discuss where you get your materials or what you pay for them,” Octavian Babici, another former construction associate, told me. “But with Danny it was even more so. No one knew what he was thinking.” In person, Boldor carries himself as a man with better places to be and better people to meet. The names of Arab oil princes, Nigerian construction tycoons and Indian hospitality tycoons come and go in his stories. At The Buffet, when he wasn’t going through a box of thin white Sobranie cigarettes, he was frantically ringing his phone, sometimes pausing to grab a toothpick from the table and poke the inside of his ear. When he sensed my impatience, he would stop to dispense morsels of expertise. From Europe’s environmental authorities: “They are playing tricks with words. ‘Dangerous wastes’! But there is no hazardous waste here in Baia Mare. Go try it.” On Romania’s political class: “Everyone can be corrupt. But you just have to know how to corrupt them.” Get the Guardian’s award-winning in-depth reads sent straight to you every Saturday morning After 10 years in London, Boldor decided to return home to take care of his elderly parents. There was no grand plan, he told me. But he wasn’t the kind of person to wait for something to fall into his lap. Boldor’s native Transylvania may be a poor place, but it’s also a place blessed with amazing riches. The fertility of its soil is legendary. Some of Europe’s last primeval forests cover its hills. But the region’s most sought-after treasure lies out of sight. Beneath the Carpathian Mountains, which snake across Transylvania, lie some of the largest gold and copper deposits in the world. Romania’s history could be written in the waves of foreigners – invaders and colonizers from the Slavs to the Saxons – who have laid claim to this wealth. In 1947, 30 years before Boldor was born, Romania’s communist dictatorship turned the mining of these mountains into a massive, communal enterprise. Every morning for almost half a century, 10,000 residents of Baia Mare boarded cable cars that took them to the mountains. There, they collected valuable earth, which was transported to a huge metallurgical complex on the marshy eastern edges of Baia Mare, little more than two miles from the pastel storefronts of the old Habsburg center. Originally known as Phoenix, and later as Cuprom, its workers were tasked with grinding and smelting vats of mined material into copper and gold ingots. By 1970, Cuprom had become one of the most productive industrial complexes in Cold War Europe, producing tons of precious metals every month. Then, in December 1989, the world that had built Cuprom collapsed. A popular uprising culminated in the execution by firing squad of Romania’s communist dictator, Nicolae Ceausescu. Almost overnight, the cult of productivity that aspired to provide the nation with full employment and industrial self-reliance disappeared. Thousands of miners from Baia Mare have left, many heading to Chile to work its coppers. The worst was to follow. If Baia Mare is known anywhere outside Romania today, it is the site of one of Europe’s greatest environmental disasters. In January 2000, heavy snowmelt caused 26 million gallons of stagnant cyanide – used to extract gold from ore at Cuprom and sitting in a huge basin two miles west of the city – to overflow its plastic lining and spill into a nearby river. The poison then traveled through the waterways of southeastern Europe, killing fish, birds, and even horses as it went. Within four days, cyanide leaked into the Danube, poisoning the drinking water of more than 2 million people in four countries, before eventually spilling into the Black Sea. Baia Mare became a byword for destruction. And yet the mountains around the city still held vast mineral wealth, and during the 2000s, international investors flocked to the city…
title: “The Mud King How One Man Turned An Industrial Wasteland Into His El Dorado Romania Klmat” ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-07” author: “Nicholas Collins”
It sounded like a fairy tale. A few years earlier, hundreds of miles north of Bucharest, deep in the mountains of Transylvania, a Roma claimed to have discovered a great lost treasure: thousands of tons of gold and copper that had been mined decades earlier and then forgotten. His name was Daniel Boldor and he had a plan. He found investors all over the world. He paid his compatriot Roma to collect the metal for him. Then he started selling his treasure. Buyers from South Africa to South Korea proved willing to pay huge sums of money for it. Soon Boldor became a very rich man. He also proved to be more than just a businessman. During a difficult economic decade, in a country that had its natural resources plundered by multinational corporations, he became a renegade, tracksuit-wearing Robin Hood. He took from Romania’s abusive communist past and gave hope to its present. He employed hundreds of Roma who were fiercely loyal to him. He built an empire out of lost gold and drove the sports cars to prove it. It sounded like a fairy tale because, the police continued, it was. They proceeded to tell a second story, just as shocking as the first. The true story, they claimed, was that Boldor had gotten rich by selling treasure that never actually existed. It was all an elaborate scam. They took out their phones and scrolled through pictures of people with shovels standing next to ragged piles of what looked like rubble. This is what Boldor was sending, the officers said, holding out their phones in front of me so I could see better. According to officers, Boldor had defrauded companies around the world by taking their money and then sending them soil. Daniel Boldor in Fersig, Romania. Photo: Alex Clapp And for years, they said, he had somehow gotten away with it — until 2015, when Boldor’s largest shipment in history was destroyed by Chinese customs officials, who opened one of the cargo containers of metal he had shipped and discovered 20 tons 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 Constanta, one of the country’s toughest prosecutors was trying to sentence Boldor to 10 years in prison on charges ranging from tax evasion to customs fraud. Where is Boldor now, I finally answered in the cops room. They shrugged. No one could really tell. A few days later I boarded a 12-hour night train from Bucharest to Transylvania to try to find him. Tucked away near the borders of Ukraine and Hungary, the town of Baia Mare lies at the northern tip of Transylvania, amid a rolling carpet of tawny farmland that gives way to snow-capped mountains. On my first morning in town last year, the head of its environmental police informed me that Daniel Boldor was not in Baia Mare, and probably not even in Romania, for that matter. But only a few hours later, the owner of a local pawn shop told me he knew Boldor and called him. After telling Boldor that I was a journalist, he handed me the phone. Certainly, said Boldor, he was at Baia Mare and free to meet. He could also get me an interview with the mayor of the town if I was interested. A short, wiry man with intense brown eyes and a thin voice, Boldor met me at The Buffet, a cafe located – as Boldor pointed out on our first day together – on the same street as the city’s police headquarters and the courthouse. of the county. During my next few weeks in Baia Mare, Boldor spent much of his time at The Buffet. Along with nine companies and properties across Romania, as well as an apartment in Dubai and shares in a Swiss ski resort, he claimed to own it. Most days he would enter the coffee shop in the early afternoon, usually dressed in dark sweatpants and a hooded parka, and head to a corner booth, where he would spend the next few hours talking on his phone with practiced fatigue, occasionally entertaining himself with questions about who he was. and why he had problems with the police. Nicolae Ceaușescu with a worker in a metallurgical factory in Resita, 1970. Photo: Interfoto/Alamy His story began rather unexpectedly. In 2001, aged 24, Boldor left Baia Mare for west London and began working in the building trade. His first job involved demolishing bathrooms and kitchens around Harrow and Notting Hill. He spoke little English at the time and shared a dirty apartment with a handful of other Romanians. Once he had saved £15,000, he set up his own construction company. By 2007, he had summoned his four younger brothers from Romania and assigned them to his construction sites across the UK, which he began to fill with electricians from Eastern Europe and masons from Ireland. Boldor climbed up quickly. Only a few years after dismantling kitchens in Notting Hill, he was overseeing the refurbishment of a 100-room hotel, the Enterprise in Earls Court. “There was no problem with Daniel,” Ben Regeb, a Tunisian marble seller who supplied Boldor with material for his construction work on Harrow Central Mosque in 2010, told me. Boldor gave little of himself. “In the construction industry you don’t discuss where you get your materials or what you pay for them,” Octavian Babici, another former construction associate, told me. “But with Danny it was even more so. No one knew what he was thinking.” In person, Boldor carries himself as a man with better places to be and better people to meet. The names of Arab oil princes, Nigerian construction tycoons and Indian hospitality tycoons come and go in his stories. At The Buffet, when he wasn’t going through a box of thin white Sobranie cigarettes, he was frantically ringing his phone, sometimes pausing to grab a toothpick from the table and poke the inside of his ear. When he sensed my impatience, he would stop to dispense morsels of expertise. From Europe’s environmental authorities: “They are playing tricks with words. ‘Dangerous wastes’! But there is no hazardous waste here in Baia Mare. Go try it.” On Romania’s political class: “Everyone can be corrupt. But you just have to know how to corrupt them.” Get the Guardian’s award-winning in-depth reads sent straight to you every Saturday morning After 10 years in London, Boldor decided to return home to take care of his elderly parents. There was no grand plan, he told me. But he wasn’t the kind of person to wait for something to fall into his lap. Boldor’s native Transylvania may be a poor place, but it’s also a place blessed with amazing riches. The fertility of its soil is legendary. Some of Europe’s last primeval forests cover its hills. But the region’s most sought-after treasure lies out of sight. Beneath the Carpathian Mountains, which snake across Transylvania, lie some of the largest gold and copper deposits in the world. Romania’s history could be written in the waves of foreigners – invaders and colonizers from the Slavs to the Saxons – who have laid claim to this wealth. In 1947, 30 years before Boldor was born, Romania’s communist dictatorship turned the mining of these mountains into a massive, communal enterprise. Every morning for almost half a century, 10,000 residents of Baia Mare boarded cable cars that took them to the mountains. There, they collected valuable earth, which was transported to a huge metallurgical complex on the marshy eastern edges of Baia Mare, little more than two miles from the pastel storefronts of the old Habsburg center. Originally known as Phoenix, and later as Cuprom, its workers were tasked with grinding and smelting vats of mined material into copper and gold ingots. By 1970, Cuprom had become one of the most productive industrial complexes in Cold War Europe, producing tons of precious metals every month. Then, in December 1989, the world that had built Cuprom collapsed. A popular uprising culminated in the execution by firing squad of Romania’s communist dictator, Nicolae Ceausescu. Almost overnight, the cult of productivity that aspired to provide the nation with full employment and industrial self-reliance disappeared. Thousands of miners from Baia Mare have left, many heading to Chile to work its coppers. The worst was to follow. If Baia Mare is known anywhere outside Romania today, it is the site of one of Europe’s greatest environmental disasters. In January 2000, heavy snowmelt caused 26 million gallons of stagnant cyanide – used to extract gold from ore at Cuprom and sitting in a huge basin two miles west of the city – to overflow its plastic lining and spill into a nearby river. The poison then traveled through the waterways of southeastern Europe, killing fish, birds, and even horses as it went. Within four days, cyanide leaked into the Danube, poisoning the drinking water of more than 2 million people in four countries, before eventually spilling into the Black Sea. Baia Mare became a byword for destruction. And yet the mountains around the city still held vast mineral wealth, and during the 2000s, international investors flocked to the city…
