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.
“To hold a coin or medal produced by the Mint is to connect to the founding principles of our nation,” the Mint declares.
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.
Congress in 1985 prohibited the Mint from making bullion out of foreign gold because it wanted to insulate the process from human rights abuses, primarily in apartheid South Africa. The Mint has flouted that law, across Democratic and Republican administrations, despite internal warnings.
Now, even President Trump’s 24-karat gold coin, commemorating the United States’ 250th birthday, could come from a swirl of non-American gold from any number of sources.
The Mint, the biggest name in the global market for investment gold coins, is an example of how the industry’s guardrails have collapsed. Gold prices hover around $5,000 an ounce, about four times the price of a decade ago. That gives criminal organizations and fly-by-night operators a huge incentive to mine in wasteful, destructive and risky ways.
Investors buy gold as a hedge against instability. Nearly every terrorist attack, war and financial meltdown in the past quarter-century has fueled a gold-buying frenzy.
But as prices climb ever higher, wealthy buyers are actually helping to create the very instability they are trying to hedge against.
Gold mining funds Sudan’s brutal civil war and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Surging gold prices have helped Venezuela and Iran temper the effects of financial sanctions. Colombia’s biggest cartel, the Clan del Golfo, traffics in gold alongside cocaine — and uses the proceeds to maintain control through murder and bombings. Illegal miners deforest and pollute the Amazon, poisoning people there with mercury. Terrorist groups, including some linked to Al Qaeda, are getting into the gold business, too.
The easier it is to sell this gold on the world’s legitimate exchanges, the easier it is to make war, sustain an autocracy, launder money or destroy the environment. Drug cartel gold ending up at the U.S. Mint is one example of that process in action.
The industry’s biggest players speak about bright lines between legal and criminal gold. Buying from a reputable source, like the Mint, is supposed to ensure that criminals, terrorists and polluters do not profit. In fact, the Mint has looked away for decades as gold from dubious sources flows into its plant in West Point, N.Y.
We tracked hundreds of millions of dollars in foreign gold entering the Mint’s supply chain in recent years. That includes secondhand gold, with provenance that is difficult or even impossible to determine, and gold from countries like Colombia and Nicaragua, where the industry is linked to criminal groups.
When we first approached the Mint, a spokesman said that its gold came entirely from the United States, as the law requires. After we shared our findings, the Mint said the U.S. was its “primary” source and said it was taking steps to better track its gold.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, whose department oversees the Mint, said he would investigate the gold procurement practices.
“This review is focused on ensuring that the U.S. Mint’s gold suppliers comply with the law and strictly satisfy their obligations, and that the Mint takes every step possible to continue to vigorously safeguard our national security and uphold market integrity,” he said in a written statement.
For illegally mined foreign gold to become an American Eagle coin, two seeming acts of alchemy occur.
First, the illegal gold becomes legal.
Second, it becomes American.
To see this sleight of hand at work, we headed into the heart of Clan del Golfo territory in northwestern Colombia. A six-hour drive from Medellín took us down the northern slope of the Andes and into the tropical lowlands.
Just outside the small city of Caucasia, a sign announced that we had arrived at a cattle ranch owned by the government “for the benefit of the Colombian people.”
It was clear that the Colombian government had long ago lost control. The roadside sign was charred black. An old man raised fighting roosters. All around, workers were grinding up the land, openly flouting a ban on mining.
The miners call the ranch La Mandinga, a name for an evil spirit.
For the past eight years, the Clan del Golfo has run La Mandinga with a short list of rules, a pair of mining supervisors told us. The most important: Nobody mines without cartel permission, and everybody pays.
Every month, the supervisors said, a man on a motorbike collects the Clan’s cut, $400 for each team of five. There are hundreds of teams, perhaps a thousand or more.
They work in open-air mines, using excavators and high-pressure hoses to turn La Mandinga’s hillsides into mud. Picking the tiny flecks of gold from that muck is impossible, so the miners mix the mud with mercury and stir by hand until the mercury binds to the gold.
All of this is illegal, environmentally destructive and toxic.
The Colombian authorities occasionally conduct airstrikes and raids on mines that support the Clan. But the miners at La Mandinga apparently need not worry, even though their operation directly abuts a military base. They operate with such impunity that, when we flew a drone over the area in February, we saw that workers had breached the base’s perimeter and were mining for gold on military land. [Related: See What Happened After We Found a Cartel Mine on a Military Base.]
At day’s end, workers gather their gray globs of mercury and gold, each about the size of a marble, and wrap them in plastic. They stuff these marbles in their pockets and drive their motorbikes down La Mandinga’s dirt paths and into nearby Caucasia.
La Mandinga gold has no business making its way into the United States. Secretary of State Marco Rubio called the Clan “a violent and powerful criminal organization” last year when the United States designated the cartel a terrorist group.
The Treasury Department keeps Clan del Golfo leaders on a financial blacklist, banning American companies from doing business with them. Government organizations and academics have documented the cartel’s gold mining activities here for years. (A Colombian lawyer for the cartel did not return a call for comment.)
Caucasia is a gold-rush city. Businesses sell excavators, pumps and million-dollar dredges for illegal riverbed mining. Fancy cafes and dance clubs have sprung up. Miners can sell gold to any of hundreds of storefronts. Every month, two shop owners told us, the Clan collects $400 from them, too.
Alex Cuevas works in one such shop. One by one, miners pass him mercury-and-gold marbles through a hole in a plexiglass window. His hands tremble — a symptom, he says, of long-term mercury poisoning.
Mr. Cuevas burns off the mercury with a blowtorch, weighs what is left and pays out cash — $2,500 for miners who had a good day, $50 or less for the unlucky. At the end of the night, he melts the gold together in a crucible and pours it into a mold.
And just like that, the first metamorphosis is complete. The gold is legal. The mercury, the off-limits mining, the payments to the Clan — it is all erased.
How?
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?
And Mr. Cuevas does. He says each gram he buys is linked to a licensed miner. Every shop that sells gold for legal export keeps these ledgers, he says.
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.
There the gold becomes American.
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.
Mr. Hanlon said that his company was on the lookout for illegal gold. But at this point, the Mandinga gold is legal, thanks to the shop ledgers and export paperwork. That means Mr. Hanlon’s purchases and sales are legal. (Mr. Hanlon said that he was surprised we found cartel gold in his pipeline. The company suspended purchases from the Colombian exporter.)
Among Dillon Gage’s biggest clients are two Mint suppliers, Mr. Hanlon said. He said he gives his customers annual lists of his sources, so even though the customers treat the gold as American, they know its true origins.
La Mandinga is just one of many cartel-controlled mines in the region. Mr. Cuevas works at one of hundreds of shops in just one city. There are many exporters, and even more buyers. In this trillion-dollar market, notorious for fraud and money laundering, the distinctions between dirty gold and clean exist mainly on paper. Unless a customer is willing to check, the distinctions melt away.
The Mint does not check.
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.
If it had, it would have found a remarkably transparent supply chain. Through import and export databases and interviews with intermediary companies, we found dozens of foreign sources in the Mint’s gold pipeline.
Those included industrial mines in Mexico and Peru. Some suppliers, like pawn shops, specialize in recycled jewelry.
One of the historically largest Mint suppliers, a Utah refiner called Asahi USA, is open about the fact that its cauldron contains gold from many different countries. Some of it comes from Dillon Gage. But there is gold from all over. “It’s commingled,” the company’s refining chief, Paul Healey, said. “And it comes out the other side.” Mr. Healey said the company would investigate our findings about the Clan del Golfo.
The Mint has said, in response to internal audits, that its gold counts as American because its suppliers offset any foreign gold with American gold. If the Mint buys a ton of gold, for example, it expects the supplier to buy that much American gold at some point.
U.S. law makes no allowance for this kind of trade-off. And for decades, the Mint has not enforced that provision or even asked its suppliers to comply, the Treasury’s inspector general found.
Even if it had, everything in the big Texas cauldron, including the cartel gold, could count as American.
But the Mint goes beyond not asking questions. It openly buys from sources that could not possibly supply the newly mined American gold the law requires. In recent years, records show, the Mint has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on gold bars from the Canadian Copper Refinery, which gets its gold from the slime that is left over from processing copper, not from newly mined gold.
Some of that copper comes from a Congolese mine owned in part by the Chinese government, export records show.
The Mint’s sourcing practices have at times raised red flags inside the Treasury Department, including during Mr. Trump’s first term, when the inspector general began asking questions.
That investigation took five years to complete. Along the way, auditors found serious problems. They said that the Mint was not following its own policies and that the Mint’s gold-offset plan (one ton of foreign gold for one ton of American gold) might violate U.S. law.
The Biden administration responded in 2024, saying it was just months away from publishing new plans for investigating gold sources.
It never did.
A Treasury spokeswoman said that the Trump administration was already taking steps to identify its gold sources. It has not cut off foreign gold; doing so, she said, would make it impossible to meet demand. But the government monitors its purchases.
The Mint still has not released its gold-tracking policy.
Justin Scheck is a London-based reporter for The Times.
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