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 Constanța, 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.
Tucked close to the borders with Ukraine and Hungary, the city of Baia Mare sits at the northern edge of Transylvania, amid a billowed carpet of tawny farmland that gives way to snow-splotched mountains. On my first morning in the city 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 scrapyard told me that he knew Boldor and proceeded to call him up. After telling Boldor I was a journalist, he handed me the phone. Sure, Boldor said, he was in Baia Mare and free to meet. He could also get me an interview with the city’s mayor, if I was interested.
A short, swaggering man with intense brown eyes and a gravelly 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 county courthouse. Over my next few weeks in Baia Mare, Boldor spent much of his time at The Buffet. Along with nine companies, and real estate across Romania, plus an apartment in Dubai and stakes in a Swiss ski resort, he claimed to own it. Most days he would strut into the cafe in the early afternoon, usually dressed in dark sweatpants and a hooded parka, and head for a corner booth, where he’d spend the next few hours talking into his phone with practised weariness, occasionally entertaining my questions about who he was and why he was in trouble with the police.
His story began unremarkably enough. In 2001, age 24, Boldor left Baia Mare for west London and took up work 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 dingy flat with a handful of other Romanians. Once he had saved £15,000, he set up a construction firm of his own. By 2007, he had called in his four younger brothers from Romania and appointed them to his building sites across the UK, which he began filling with electricians from eastern Europe and bricklayers from Ireland.
Boldor climbed quickly. Only a few years after he was dismantling kitchens in Notting Hill he was overseeing the refurbishment of a 100-room hotel, the Enterprise in Earls Court. “There was no messing about with Daniel,” Ben Rejeb, a Tunisian marble salesman who provided Boldor with material for his construction work on the Harrow Central Mosque in 2010, told me. Boldor gave away little about 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 partner, told me. “But with Danny this was even more the case. No one knew what he was thinking.”
In person, Boldor carries himself like a man with better places to be and better people to meet. The names of Arab oil princelings, Nigerian construction moguls and Indian hospitality tycoons bob in and out of his stories. At The Buffet, when he wasn’t working his way through a carton of thin white Sobranie cigarettes, he would be tapping away frantically on his phone, occasionally stopping to snatch a toothpick off the table and rake the inside of his ear. When he detected impatience on my end, he would pause to dispense morsels of knowhow. Of Europe’s environmental authorities: “They play tricks with words. ‘Hazardous waste’! But there’s no hazardous waste here in Baia Mare. Go test it.” Of Romania’s political class: “They can all be corrupted. But you just need to know how to corrupt them.”
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After 10 years in London, Boldor decided to return home to take care of his ageing parents. There was no grand plan, he told me. But he wasn’t the kind of man who would wait for something to fall into his lap.
Boldor’s native Transylvania may be a poor place, but it’s also one blessed with staggering riches. The fertility of its soil is legendary. Some of Europe’s last primeval forests quilt its hills. But the region’s most coveted treasure lies out of sight. Beneath the Carpathian Mountains, which coil down through Transylvania like a serpent, sit some of the world’s largest deposits of gold and copper. Romania’s history could be written in the waves of outsiders – invaders and colonisers from the Slavs to the Saxons – who have launched claims to this wealth.
In 1947, 30 years before Boldor was born, Romania’s communist dictatorship turned the mining of those mountains into a huge, communal undertaking. Every morning for almost half a century, 10,000 residents of Baia Mare boarded cable cars that lofted them into the mountains. There, they pick-axed valuable earth, which was transported to a vast metallurgical complex on the swampy eastern edges of Baia Mare, a little more than two miles from the pastel storefronts of its old Habsburg centre. Originally known as Phoenix, and later as Cuprom, its workers were tasked with grinding and smelting troughs of excavated material into ingots of copper and gold. By 1970, Cuprom had become one of cold war Europe’s most productive industrial complexes, churning out tonnes of precious metals every month.
Then, in December 1989, the world that had built Cuprom came crashing down. A popular uprising culminated in the execution by firing squad of Romania’s communist dictator, Nicolae Ceaușescu. Virtually overnight, the cult of productivity that had aspired to provide the nation with full employment and industrial self-reliance vanished. Thousands of miners from Baia Mare left, many heading for Chile to work its copper pits.
Worse was to follow. If Baia Mare is known anywhere outside Romania today, it is as the site of one of Europe’s greatest environmental disasters. In January 2000, heavy snow melt caused 26m 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 pour into a nearby river. The poison then worked its way across the waterways of south-eastern Europe, killing fish, birds and even horses as it progressed. Within four days, the cyanide had coursed into the Danube, poisoning the drinking supply of more than 2 million people across four countries, before finally flushing out into the Black Sea.
Baia Mare became a byword for catastrophe. And yet the mountains around the city still possessed vast mineral wealth, and over the 2000s, international investors flew to the city in the…
