Dirty Gold: The Rise and Fall of an International Smuggling Ring

An in-depth discussion with veteran investigative reporters KYRA GURNEY, NICHOLAS NEHAMAS,  JAY WEAVER and JIM WYSS as host  JOHN COX digs into their work to tell the story of death, drugs, and corruption within the gold mining industry within Latin America and the the impact the pursuit of greed has on the people caught both willingly and unwillingly within its wake. [rsvp required; see below]

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NICHOLAS NEHAMAS  is an investigative reporter at the Miami Herald, where he was part of the Pulitzer Prize-winning team that broke the Panama Papers in 2016. He and his Herald colleagues were also named Pulitzer finalists in 2019 for the series “Dirty Gold, Clean Cash.” He has co-authored two books, The Grifter’s Club: Trump, Mar-a-Lago, and the Selling of the Presidency  and Dirty Gold: The Rise and Fall of an International Smuggling Ring. He joined the Herald in 2014, where he covered healthcare and real estate before joining the investigations team.

KYRA GURNEY is a journalist based in Washington, D.C. She has worked at the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and at the Miami Herald, where she and her co-authors were finalists for the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for explanatory reporting for “Dirty Gold, Clean Cash,” a series on the illegal gold trade. Before working at the Miami Herald, Kyra was a reporter at InSight Crime, a nonprofit investigative journalism outlet based in Colombia. Kyra has a master’s degree in journalism from Columbia University.

JAY WEAVER  is an award-winning journalist who has covered the federal courts and produced major investigative projects at the Miami Herald for more than 20 years. In 2018, he collaborated with a team of Herald reporters on an investigative series about a multibillion-dollar money-laundering scheme involving Miami imports of tons of gold from South America mined by cocaine traffickers and other criminals, which was honored as a 2019 Pulitzer Prize finalist for Explanatory Reporting.  In 2001, Weaver was part of the Miami Herald team that won the Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News for the paper’s coverage of the federal government’s seizure of Cuban boy Elian Gonzalez.  Weaver  received his bachelor’s degree in history from the University of California at Berkeley in 1977 and grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area.

JIM WYSS is a prize-winning journalist who has spent most of his career in Latin America. From 2011-2020 he was the Miami Herald’s South America correspondent based in Colombia, where he was also part of the reporting team that uncovered the Panama Papers and won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting. He now lives in Puerto Rico, where he covers the Caribbean for Bloomberg News. He has a master’s degree in journalism from Columbia University through the Knight-Bagehot Fellowship.

JOHN COX is the Director of UNC Charlotte’s Center for Holocaust, Genocide & Human Rights Center. He earned his PhD in History from UNC Chapel Hill and has written and lectured widely on racism and genocide, human rights, and resistance to Nazism and other oppressive systems. He is the author of two books on fascism, genocide, and resistance: To Kill a People: Genocide in the 20th Century (Oxford University Press, 2017) and Circles of Resistance: Leftist, Jewish, and Youth Dissidence during the Third Reich (2009).