Shownotes Transcript
This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. I'm Yemi Siadigoke, one of the hosts of World of Secrets, the BBC's global investigations podcast. Our investigative teams are working hard on six new investigations. Once again, they'll be told in multi-episode seasons of World of Secrets. So if you haven't followed or subscribed to the podcast, now's the time to do so, so you'll get all seasons and all episodes automatically.
From the BBC's investigations podcast, World of Secrets, here's the ninth episode of our guest season, the $6 billion gold scam from the BBC World Service and CBC. Over to Suzanne Wilton. First, a warning. This episode contains difficult subject matter, including references to suicide and death.
Simon Sembiring was scrolling through his social media messages when an invitation to connect stopped him in his tracks. This guy contacted me in LinkedIn. Guzman invited me. What? Show me. Show me. That's right. Somebody named Guzman invited you to connect on LinkedIn. I tried to find out. Yeah.
Simbiring had been director general of the Indonesian mining department, a high-profile position.
During Briex, he was involved in the negotiation of licenses with foreign mining companies. He'd been in several Briex meetings with de Guzman. That was the one. Can we click on it? Can I click? Yeah, okay. Simbiring showed me the invite that had dropped into his inbox from a geologist based in Malaysia called Michael Antonio de Guzman. Michael de Guzman, technical analyst in Malaysia. Hmm.
Michael de Guzman's face was distinctive. He had a strong, protruding lower jaw coupled with a wide chin. Unmistakable features. Okay, where's the original one?
Simon Simbiring pulls out an old photo of de Guzman to compare to the profile photo on LinkedIn. This one. Do you think they look similar? I think this is a plastic surgery. It looks young, de Guzman older, but you cannot lie about this.
You can't change your... Chin. It says Mike is a geologist skilled in geological exploration, field work such as mapping, sampling, drilling and core logging. Have been involved in several exploration projects. Did you connect? Did you accept? No, not yet. But what I'm saying is, looks like spy. Who is this guy?
After speaking with Simon Sembiering, I wasted no time messaging the profile he'd shown me. Could this be the Michael de Guzman? I'm Suzanne Wilton from the BBC World Service and CBC. This is the $6 billion gold scam. A story about the lengths people will go to in pursuit of getting rich. ♪
This is the final episode. Episode 9, The Exit Strategy. On De Guzman's last trip, his wife Jeannie witnessed him carrying a suitcase filled with cash. A lot of money, Mike. Take your money.
From Singapore, Mike brought a lot of money, you know. So when Mike returned from Canada, there were 350,000 Canadian dollars. Mike also had a diamond ring, Rolex wristwatch and US dollars. I said, "Pa, leave the money when you fly." He replied, "I can't, Ma, because this is the office's money." All the money was in a suitcase. He said, "I need to return it to the company."
Carrying so many valuables with him would have been enough to make anyone feel paranoid. When Mike was about to leave for Canada, he was saying, Ma, why do I feel like I'm being followed by someone? He phoned Jeannie several times while he was waiting for his helicopter to reportedly refuel at Samarinda Airport.
And his final phone call to Jeannie was as the helicopter was about to take flight. I can hear the sound of the helicopter blades. I'm boarding first, okay, Ma? Take care of big boy. Take care of Paula. Big boy and Paula were his kids with Jeannie.
In the event of anything going wrong, de Guzman had left clear instructions for Jeannie. Mike already told me not to be shocked if anything happened to him. Don't show up. I must be quiet, whatever his condition.
Mike asked me not to go public. Mike told me, "Ma, if anything happens to me, please don't say anything. Bring our big boy," that's what Mike called Mike Jr., "bring Paula and hide."
Whatever news about me, whatever my situation is, don't come to find me and don't talk. Around this time, de Guzman apparently rang his mother and said, pray for me, Mama. They want to kill me. It turns out de Guzman wasn't being paranoid. He was being watched, but not for the reasons he had feared. I was asked if I could put together a surveillance program
on de Guzman because de Guzman and his three Philippine colleagues, they flew to Toronto for that prospector's convention. This is Richard Jacobson, a hugely experienced private detective. He was put in charge of watching de Guzman's every move. Jacobson was working for Freeport. They wanted to make sure de Guzman went straight back to Busan after the convention in Toronto.
As an ex-CIA operative, one thing Jacobson knew how to do was set up a surveillance operation. My government work, I've seen coups and evacuations, but I've never seen something as intriguing as this. This is the first time Richard has shared the details of the operation.
The surveillance followed a really crucial period of time, those last days before de Guzman's fall from the helicopter.
As we know, while John Felderhoff was receiving the Prospector of the Year Award at the annual Prospectors and Developers Association convention in Toronto, de Guzman and his Filipino team were being ordered to fly back to Busan. Through my contacts, we were able to put a couple people on the flight from Vancouver to Hong Kong and monitor what was going on. And there were some arguments on the flight.
The Filipino geologists who accompanied de Guzman were Cesar Puzpo's Jerry Aloe and one other Filipino geologist. The couple people we had in business class that were working with us, they couldn't monitor all the conversations and that. But one of the arguments that we did hear them having was the fact that de Guzman had convertible shares. In other words, he could sell them
the minute he landed in Hong Kong. But the other Filipinos didn't have convertible shares. They had to work so long for the company before they could convert their shares. Three, four Filipinos said, you know, we might be going to jail and we can't convert our shares in that. So I think they knew at that point it was up. By the time they got to Hong Kong, they decided it wasn't worth it for them to go back to Jakarta and face whatever fate they would have to face there. They booked their flights right back to Manila.
They didn't go back to Jakarta with de Guzman. He went back by himself. We know de Guzman did not travel directly from Hong Kong to Jakarta. Instead, he traveled to Singapore, where he stopped off for a medical checkup. We had surveillance on him. And quite frankly, we should have kept it on him a little bit longer. We surveilled him to the Melia Hotel, where he stayed that night, back to the airport.
And we saw him get on the plane to Balakpapan, and we didn't surveil him anymore after that. If only they'd kept eyes on de Guzman. Then we would know for sure what actually happened to him. I felt that my job was finished and that, you know, we had done all the work all the way from Toronto back to Jakarta. So I took a weekend off and I went to Lombok for the weekend.
And then I get this call saying, return to Jakarta immediately. And that's when I found out for the first time that he had disappeared from the helicopter. What was your reaction? I mean, I was stunned. I was shocked. I mean, at that point, when I got on the airplane to go back to Jakarta, I didn't know what they were, they didn't tell me why. When did you find out? When I landed, my boss at Freeport explained to me what happened.
Then he asked me to put together a program to interrogate the crew chief of the helicopter and the pilot, which was very interesting because the pilot that day was not the normal pilot. It was an Indonesian Air Force pilot, which is very unusual. The normal pilot claimed he was sick that day. So why would you have an Indonesian Air Force pilot?
And the flight normally goes straight from Balakpapan to the mine site. It stopped in Samarinda. And I've read stories that it dropped a colleague of his off in Samarinda. You'll remember that this was Rudy Vega, the man who had told investigators it was his opinion that de Guzman had tried to take his own life the night before the flight.
Just like the other Filipino geologists, Vega had shares in Briex, but not ones he could cash in quickly. If he'd been involved in the salting of samples, he must have known that if de Guzman got to his meeting at Buseng, the whole scam would have been revealed. As one of the last people to see de Guzman before he seemingly fell from the helicopter...
Could Vega have had some knowledge of what was about to happen? Surveillance may have been halted, but Jacobson had another opportunity to find out the truth. The crew chief traveling with de Guzman was brought in for questioning. And we couldn't interrogate the pilot because he was an active duty military officer. But the crew chief of the helicopter was Filipino. And so we interrogated him.
And very strange, he said, "We picked up some cargo in San Marino." Now, he claimed it was an ambulance looking like a vehicle, but he said it looked like an ambulance. And we thought that was very unusual because, I mean, he's the crew chief. He's the one that puts the cargo into the... It's a small helicopter, it's just an Alouette helicopter. And he's the one that's supposed to load any cargo, right? We didn't believe him at first.
We also confirmed it with the flight tower. Ah, okay. So this was information that was validated as well. It was validated, yeah. And again, I've read that he had a companion with him that he dropped off in San Marino, but the crew chief never told us that. He said, we stopped in San Marino and we picked up some cargo. And San Marino was never on that chopper's flight plan normally. It was Balikpapan straight to Busan.
But that day they stopped in San Bermuda and picked up some cargo. What do you think this cargo was? I think it was a body. What? They loaded it right from the ambulance-looking vehicle into the helicopter. But we never were able to confirm it was a body. A body? Could de Guzman have taken a body on board the helicopter? The last piece of his plan to fake his own death? There's a medical university in San Bermuda.
And we went and checked the morgue, and we asked them...
did anybody come in here and take a body or buy a body and that and their answer was oh people come here all the time to get bodies you know that they'll be for the students and cadavers and that and so we said you don't remember anything about these last three days somebody coming in and no a lot of people came in here again which is suspicious i mean you don't just walk out of you know a morgue with a body and nobody knows where you're taking it and who you are
If there was a body on that flight, when did it get dropped? And more importantly, where did de Guzman go? What happened in those last moments on that helicopter? This is what Richard Jacobson wanted to find out from the crew chief who was on board. He remembered everything in excruciating detail. He said that Michael de Guzman was writing letters to
Now, you've been on a helicopter before. It's hard to write a letter on it. But he, so much detail that he even said, I saw him put registered stamps on the letters. He knew they were registered stamps. That's a pretty incredible detail. And then he said, he wrote about four or five letters. We don't know who, he didn't tell us, you know, he couldn't see who they were addressed to and that. And he put them in his carry-on bag.
And then he took off his Rolex watch. And then he took off his, he wore a lot of gold. And so then he took off his gold necklace. And he's telling us everything in excruciating detail, yet he never saw him get up and jump out of the helicopter. We said, excuse me, the helicopter's moving at very high speed. You didn't see him get up and open the door? Nope, never saw it.
His story really fell apart at that point. I mean, it's a small helicopter. You would think you would notice somebody standing up and trying to open the door, you know, against the wind and jumping out. I'm not sure he ever got on that helicopter, and that's where we dropped the ball because we only surveilled him when he got on the plane in Jakarta to Balikpapan. But the fact that that pilot was not the real pilot, that he was an Indonesian Air Force officer...
somebody had to direct him to be on that private helicopter. Like many others, Jacobson also questioned how de Guzman's body was found so quickly in the thick jungle. The fact that they even found a body is a miracle. I mean, it's rainforest. If you fly over from Balikpapan to where Busang was, it's triple canopy jungle. And I just was very suspicious when they found the body.
How do you find a body in triple canopy jungle unless you know where to look for it? Jennifer Wells' book details that Pilot allegedly noted the GPS coordinates at that moment that the door opened. See, don't you find that suspicious? The crew chief doesn't remember him even jumping out of the chopper. So, I mean, all of a sudden the pilot noted the GPS coordinates
Who knows, that's when he jumped out of the helicopter. They just knew where to throw the body or dump the body. Our investigation keeps coming back to that body.
There was something that de Guzman's wife Jeannie said during our interview, which hadn't got focused on before. And it could be crucial. When the decayed corpse was found, it was unrecognizable. But the teeth were intact. Mike didn't have teeth. His teeth were all false. This is de Guzman's Indonesian wife Jeannie. Who knows Mike...
The only person who knew about his false teeth was me and his family in the Philippines. Maybe the other wives would not know about it because Mike was embarrassed of it and Mike only met them recently. When he's with me, when he's about to eat, he puts his teeth in a tissue, both upper and lower teeth. He didn't have any teeth.
Andrew Neal from Freeport remembers the trouble surrounding the disclosure of de Guzman's dental records. If those dental records showed de Guzman had no teeth, then that would have meant the body found on the jungle floor could not be him. They were hounding the dentist in the Philippines, and he says, I can't release any results yet because I'm waiting on some paperwork from the family.
He was waiting to get paid. And he would say, yeah, these are the dental records of de Guzman. You know, money talks in this country. And, you know, just about anything can be bought here. Because there was a delay because they kept on saying, well, we're going to prove it through dental records. The dental records were never released by the family. And the dentist has since died. If this was all a plan by de Guzman to fake his own death, how did he pull it all together?
Richard Jacobson. He would need to have somebody in the Indonesian government. Again, we don't know who that pilot was. We don't know who paid that pilot to be there that day. We don't know why the other pilot. I mean, he claimed he wasn't feeling well that day. But you cancel the flight then. I mean, you don't go out and get an Indonesian Air Force pilot to fly your helicopter. He had to have paid some people. I mean, assuming he did have an escape plan.
I think the most likely escape plan from my perspective would have been by sea. No detection. Have you ever told this story to anyone? Only friends. I mean, I've never talked about Briecks and that. These details, though, there's been many books written about Briecks, and I've never seen these details. It's not my nature to seek out people and
especially the media, to talk about this. I know the resources are available to find out if he's still alive or not, but I mean, I'm just surprised that nobody's really put an effort into it. One of the brothers said he wanted to just let sleeping dogs lie. About a year and a half after de Guzman's reported death, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, investigating Brieck's, flew Jacobson over from Jakarta to Manila for an interview.
I found it very strange. They never asked me about what you're asking me about. The surveillance we did or the interrogation. They didn't. You know, the meeting lasted two hours. And I expected they would have asked a lot deeper questions, but they were more interested in focusing on the money trail. And what happened to his $15 million in shares?
de Guzman was never a fugitive. The Indonesians never issued a red notice to the international police organization, Interpol. If he'd escaped, he was free to cross borders and continents via land, sea, and air.
My name is Kyle Tequila, host of the shocking new true crime podcast, Crook County. I got recruited into the mob when I was 17 years old. People are dying. Is he doing this every night? Kenny was a Chicago firefighter who lived a secret double life as a mafia hitman. I had a wife and I had two children. Nobody knew anything. He was a freaking crazy man. He was my father and I had no idea about any of this until now.
Crook County is available now. Listen for free on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I know you've spoken to Jenny. I rang her last night. I'm very close to Jenny. How are you? How do you know her? She comes from Palankaraya. Cali-Mantan geologist Mansur Geiger, who you heard from in the last episode, comforted Jeannie de Guzman after she heard of her husband's reported death.
When the news came out that Mike had fallen from the helicopter, of course she was totally distraught. Myself and my colleague more because he knew her better. Yeah, we kind of tried to look after her in Palankaraya and she was in distress. And so, yeah, we would take her out to lunch and try and entertain her and cheer her up. The kids were still really small.
While we were talking, Mansour Giger shared a surprising revelation. She showed up at the office one day and she said, "Oh, guess what? Mike rang me up. He's in Coca-Cabana down in South America and sent me some money and everything's fine." What did you think? Did you believe her? Yes.
In 2005, Jakarta journalist John McBeth and his friend from Barrick, Tim Scott, were having lunch with Jeannie de Guzman when she, again, mentioned contact with her supposedly dead husband, Michael de Guzman.
We were sitting there at lunch at the Damawangsa Hotel, I remember, and suddenly in the middle of the lunch, she dropped this bombshell on us that Michael de Guzman had sent her $250,000 from somewhere. According to Jeannie, this transfer happened around six weeks after de Guzman reportedly jumped from the helicopter. He had called the maid and told her to tell Jeannie to look in her bank account.
I remember Scott and I looked at each other. Well, I mean, we were eyebrows raised, but we didn't want to sort of do too much, go too much further with it. And I remember later I arranged to interview Jeannie here, in this house right there. And she sort of elaborated on it all. I think she's pretty convinced that he was alive. She said the maid knew his voice, knew Michael's voice.
And he was laughing. She sort of resigned to the fact that probably she wouldn't see him again.
A few months after the first transfer, Jeannie told Macbeth she received another one. One of the Citibank staff knew me and told me that the transaction came from Citibank Brazil. And there's also Mike's signature. There's Mike's signature. It's not from another person. It's Mike's signature.
It was thought that he was in Brazil. The second phone call that the maid got, he said he was in Brazil. That second transfer of $25,000 took place on February 14. Do you know what the other significance is of February 14? De Guzman's birthday. Oh, oh, well, yes. Oh, okay. ♪♪
We asked Jeannie for proof of these alleged money transfers, but she never sent them. If de Guzman did make it to Brazil six weeks after he reportedly jumped, where was he holed up prior to landing in South America?
businessman Warren Irwin thinks he knows. I have a buddy of mine who was having lunch in the Philippines about a week or two after Mike de Guzman allegedly fell from the helicopter. He was having lunch with a bunch of geologists and this Filipino guy comes in and is leaving and they all stood up, gave him a standing elevation, clapped his hands. Guy looked at them, smiled, went on his way. My buddy goes, who's that? He goes, well, that was Mike de Guzman. Oh, okay.
All these geos just gave him a standing ovation for the scam he pulled off, faking his death, the whole thing. And he left, left the restaurant. You don't think he would have surfaced by now? He has. A friend of mine knows a guy who's had lunch with him within the last few years. Mike has had plastic surgery, and my buddy states this is 100% legit.
And my other close friend saw him over lunch. This recently happened, I think probably five years ago. This other story happened. Clearly you believe he's alive. Of course he is. He's alive. Come on. So how do you think he managed to pull that off? Tossed a dead body out. If you'd faked your own death, would you really be dining at a hotel restaurant so soon after?
I contacted the guy who Warren Irwin says saw de Guzman to check out his story. He related the same sequence of events, saying it was unmistakably de Guzman, even down to the way he parted his hair.
As I was wrapping up my interview with Mansur Giger, the man who, in his own words, is very close to Jeannie, de Guzman's wife, he caught a hold of my arm and whispered, You do know that de Guzman is still alive, don't you? He's in the Cayman Islands. Mansur refused to confirm how he knew this.
But Andrew Neal, the metallurgist from Freeport, had also heard Geiger's claim. All I can do is repeat what he told me, was that for a while he was in Copacabana, and now he's in the Cayman Islands. Could he really be in the Cayman Islands? And remember, that LinkedIn profile Simon Sambiring showed me at the start of the episode? The one he thought was Michael de Guzman?
A day after I sent a message, a reply pinged into my inbox. Could he really be about to reveal himself after all this time? But this was not the Michael Deguzman as Sembiring had thought and I had hoped, but the son he had with Jeannie, who he affectionately called Big Boy.
As Mike went missing, I got entrusted with another Mike. He's really the copy version of his dad. From his genius thinking, his traits and his works is also in geology. He's absolutely the copy of his dad.
Michael Jr. was a young baby when his dad died. All I know about my dad is that he's a geologist. That's the main thing. I've played around with his reports, basically whatever he left behind at our house back in Jakarta. And I know he's responsible for some of the major mines that he's currently producing in Indonesia for the past 20 years. Other than that, I know he's a really good family man.
Then based on the stories and I guess judging my own personal traits, I know he is someone that doesn't lie and then he keeps to himself. He's not violent but he's harsh. Like he's very direct, he's straightforward. Then I guess pretty much that's all I know.
Michael de Guzman Jr. has no personal memories of his dad, but has heard stories about him from relatives. He not only looks identical to a young Michael de Guzman, he's developing the same career as his dad, geology. When Michael de Guzman Jr. went to study geology at university, he found that the Brieck story got there before him.
It just surprises me that by the time that I stepped into uni, because I'm taking geology, turns out that one of my friends were about the same age. Her parents know about my dad and is actually one of the investors who invested in Brie X from Australia. And then her family is one of the family that is affected by the whole economical breakdown. They didn't really bear hatred.
to my dad or me specifically, they just know that mining is a dangerous game. I've been connected to the Briac story for more than two decades now. And I've spent the last couple of years traveling across the world to Jakarta and Manila, speaking to everyone involved in this story, or at least everyone who would agree to talk to me.
I've found out a lot, but there are still so many questions that remain unanswered. If I can't speak to Michael de Guzman, then perhaps the other person who could have unlocked this whole thing was the man he spent his final days with.
On de Guzman's last night, he and Brieck's metallurgist, Rudy Vega, discussed how they were going to present their lab results at the crunch meeting in Busang. I would love to know what they came up with. Vega was meant to be on that helicopter ride to Busang, but instead he waived the flight off. Why didn't he go with de Guzman to the showdown with Freeport?
Did he have a role in any of this? In 1997, when the whole Briex thing went down, de Guzman's son was too young to remember any of his father's colleagues. I asked him if, over the years, he'd ever heard from any of them. I actually did back when I was in grade 4 or grade 3 and 4. We were still in Palangka. I received a phone call through my cell phone
It was just recently registered, but I remember it was way too early in the morning, around like 4 or 3 a.m. I received a call. It's just the sound of an old man. And he just said, like, I'm really sorry for what I've done to your family. And then when I asked who this was, I'd heard the name Rudy Vega. But what had Rudy Vega done to the de Guzman family? What was he sorry for?
Was the person on the other end of the line even Rudy Vega? Or was it de Guzman? A few years after the call, Vega died, and with it, an opportunity to discover the truth. Despite the fallout from the $6 billion gold scam, Michael de Guzman Jr. has buckled down and focused his ambition into becoming a world-class geologist. And as he puts it...
Maybe I could start my own mines, get some investors, and again, be the better Mike De Guzman. The $6 billion gold scam is produced by BBC Scotland Productions for the BBC World Service and CBC. I'm Suzanne Wilton. Our lead producer is Kate Bissell. Producers, Anna Miles, Mark Rickards. Research by Tom Hinckley. Story consultant, Jack Kibble-White.
Music and sound design by Hannes Brown. Additional sound design and audio mix by Joel Cox. Executive editor, Heather Kane-Darling. At CBC, Veronica Simmons and Willow Smith are senior producers. Chris Oak is executive producer. Cecil Fernandez is executive producer. And Arif Noorani is the director. Roeshni Nair and Anna Ashite are coordinating producers.
Tanya Springer is the Senior Manager of Audience. At the BBC World Service, Anne Dixie is Senior Podcast Producer. And John Manel is the Podcast Commissioning Editor. Thanks for listening. ♪
My name is Kyle Tequila, host of the shocking new true crime podcast, Crook County. I got recruited into the mob when I was 17 years old. People are dying. Is he doing this every night? Kenny was a Chicago firefighter who lived a secret double life as a mafia hitman. I had a wife and I had two children. Nobody knew anything. He was a freaking crazy man. He was my father and I had no idea about any of this until now.
Crook County is available now. Listen for free on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.