Produced by Alex Gibney’s Academy-Award winning Jigsaw Productions, Dirty Money is a Netflix original 6-part docuseries which tells stories of corporate corruption at the highest level.

In Season 2, Episode 4, Emmy Award-winning Director Stephen Maing takes an emersive look into the sprawling underworld of illicit gold mining and deforestation of the Peruvian Amazon, as poverty stricken miners risk their health on a daily basis, digging in contaminated cartel mines for hours on end. By entering the gold industry, it provided cartels with a better laundering scheme to clean their drug proceeeds, simply by generating fake compliance documents with shell companies to bypass custom authorities. The scheme itself eventually caught the eyes of 3 American gold brokers from Miami looking to make it big, as they suddnely found themselves entangled in importing over $3.6 billion worth of gold from Peru and other South American countries tainted by various criminal activities. In their case, Peru’s illegal gold particles are purchased by gold refining companies for a lower price, where, upon entering the legitimate market is melted together and sold to major consumer product companies all over the world. The case put a spotlight on Miami as a major gold-import capital and on mining’s devastation of the rain forest and indigenous people in South America.