Gold (2 page)

A deep mine is a truce that will always break. Mining at depth makes rock unstable. Every day at Mponeng mine they detonate 5,000 pounds of explosives. Every day they take away 6,400 tons of rock. The laws of compressive force dictate that the rock will try to close the spaces left by mining. To prevent this, engineers backfill stopes with rock and concrete. They reduce rock stress at the mining face, “softening” the rock before they blast it by drilling complex patterns around the blasting holes. In one deep mine they “fool the rock” by drilling out six-foot horizontal slots above the stopes. Since stress propagates through rock, but not through space, the empty spaces hinder the transmission of stress.

In tunnels, yard-long rock bolts anchor the unstable rock on the tunnel roof to the more stable interior of the rock mass. Patterns of rock bolts inserted in clusters are said to “knit” the rock together. Wire mesh and sprayed concrete stabilize the tunnel walls. Seismic sensors in the mine detect tremors at the first twitch, warning men to leave the rock face. But in the gold mines of South Africa there is
a destabilizing force beyond the reach of engineers. It seems beyond the reach of anyone—a huge, pervasive, violent, and desperate invading army of thieves.

Swarming the gold mines, a skilled rabble of impoverished men and women siphon off hundreds of millions of dollars a year worth of ore. Abetted by criminal gangs, they occupy vacant mining tunnels, sometimes inside working gold mines. Because South Africa's leading mines have elaborate security, invaders can't move in and out easily. Once they penetrate a mine, they may stay down for months. Deprived of sunlight, their skin turns gray. The wives and prostitutes who live with them turn gray. In South Africa they call them ghost miners. They inhabit an underground metropolis that in some goldfields can extend for forty miles, a suffocating labyrinth in which the only glitter is the dream of gold.

H
OW DIFFERENT THAT DREAM IS
from what it was.
Gold once had a sacred aura, like the anointed kings who wore it. The skull of the emperor Charlemagne is encased in a gold reliquary in the cathedral at Aachen that he founded in the eighth century. A gold cross tops St. Edward's Crown in the Tower of London. The cross showed that the king ruled by divine right. Gold was the metal that glorified God. Seville cathedral's golden altarpiece, sixty-five feet high and sixty wide, tells the life of Christ in twenty-eight panels that took more than eighty years to make.

The sacred power has morphed into a different kind of power, the chaotic power of a price that changes by the second, a cipher of nothing but wealth. Gold reflects the society that uses it. In early times it stood for an order that concentrated power in king and church—
those who monopolized violence and sacred authority. In our day, power is concentrated in the hands of a commercial elite, and gold stands for that commercial power.
In August 2011 the “BlackBerry riots,” named for the handheld devices that helped the rioters meet, and dodge police, sent tens of thousands into the streets of London to trash stores. One of the rioters' targets was the banking industry, taken as a symbol of a corrupt system. As the rioters were smashing ATMs the gold price was streaking to new heights. In South Africa, where gold is the very stuff that built the state, all the world's ills seemed to meet at the gold mine door—corruption, organized crime, violence, poverty, despair.

Surely an apocalyptic contest could be seen. On the one hand, people that history did not love: despised refugees from the poverty and war of neighboring countries; former miners discarded by a shrinking industry; masses of the wretched from the slums. And on the other hand, the owners of a substance bid up to fantastic prices by people on the run from an economic disaster some of them had helped create. Where such antagonists contend, guess who dies.

I
N
J
OHANNESBURG
I
MET A
killer called Bad Brad. He'd been charged with murdering four miners, but was not convicted. He was thirty-seven, about the size of a phone booth, and had dark blond hair and flat green eyes. We shook hands and I followed him to a parking lot where we made our way to a Jeep Grand Cherokee finished in a textured matte black vinyl wrap that gave it a satisfying, lethal appearance. In the back were Kevlar vests and a clear plastic bag of .223 rifle ammo. Bad Brad put on aviator shades and we drove off through the Sunday traffic to have a look at the place where the
four gold miners had died, two others had been injured, and the rest had fled for their lives into the pitch black galleries.

Brad Wood was not a criminal, but a gunslinger, a man hired at various times to bring order to the Wild West town that is much of South Africa. The order he brought had a price in bodies. By his own count Bad Brad had shot to death forty-two people in his sixteen years as a hired gun. The ability to do what he did, and I suppose his reputation for doing it, made him useful to the powerful people who ran a gold mine.

We took the N12 motorway west to
the town of Springs. Bad Brad showed me the extras that he had on board—a siren and flashing lights. The black Jeep was registered as an emergency response vehicle, and entitled to travel at 1.5 times the speed limit. We sailed along at this refreshing pace, and I asked Wood how he'd gotten to be a killer.

In 1995 at the age of twenty-one he had joined a special unit of the South African police and trained for work in the Durban taxi wars. Durban, on the Indian Ocean, has a population of 3.5 million. It is South Africa's main port and third largest city. As in the country's other cities, private taxis form an important transportation system from the outlying townships to the city center. Because the taxi routes are lucrative, businessmen compete for them, sometimes by killing a competitor's driver. Brad provided security by following taxis and shooting the attackers.

In January 1997, when his best friend got killed on the job, Brad quit the police and went freelance.
His first client was Mandla Gcaba, a nephew of Jacob Zuma. Zuma is now the president of South Africa, but was then deputy leader of the ruling party, the African National Congress. Although it would be twelve years before he took the highest office in the land, Jacob Zuma was still a powerful figure,
and his younger relative a well-connected businessman. “Zuma's nephew approached me and asked me to come and be his frontline body protection,” said Bad Brad. “Someone had shot him with an AK. He's got a big ugly scar on his neck. The bullet went in his back and came out his neck. He was the president of all the long-range taxis and I was his bodyguard.”

Brad was not known as Bad Brad then, nor did he earn the name in the way you might think, by shooting people. He got it by taking part in the 2001 South African version of the reality TV show
Big Brother
, a show that puts good-looking young people together in a confined space until they discover, as they do, that they are all awful. “I lasted six weeks,” said Brad. “I swore very bad, I tried to break out, I smashed the cameras. I had a bit of fun. When I was finished I left, and that was that.”

That was that except now he was famous. The newspapers had started calling him Bad Brad, and the name stuck. The notoriety did not hurt his business, nor sever his connections to the elite. When the new owners of the Aurora gold mine found their property crawling with illegal miners, they hired him to head security.

Brad's new employers were importantly connected. Jacob Zuma had been president of South Africa for a year. Brad had been bodyguard to one of his nephews in the taxi wars, and now, at the gold mine, he worked for another Zuma nephew, and for a grandson of Nelson Mandela. The second Zuma nephew, Khulubuse Zuma, and the Mandela grandson, Zondwa Mandela, were among the owners of Aurora Empowerment Systems, the company that had bought the Aurora mine from its previous owners, a firm in liquidation. In South Africa the term “empowerment” refers to the transfer of shareholder equity, often in mining companies, to black people, as part of a scheme to remedy the injustices of apartheid.

T
HE TOWN OF
S
PRINGS LIES
on the Witwatersrand, the richest goldfield in history, a 300-mile crescent that arcs around Johannesburg in a wide belt of gold deposits.
Forty percent of all the gold ever mined in the world has come from that single geological formation. Much of the Witwatersrand, except for deep mines like Mponeng, has been mined out. The Aurora mine was a case in point.
The property covered 81,000 acres in three mine licenses. In its heyday, 150 shafts had opened into hundreds of miles of tunnels that tapped the fabulous “black reef,” the carbonaceous, coal-like ore of the deposit. By the time Aurora Empowerment bought the site, only eight shafts of the original 150 remained. A mill processed what production there was and a shabby office building housed the administration.
Yet underground, the Aurora mine was a different story. The tunnel infrastructure of the mine remained intact. Invisible from the surface, a city of shafts and tunnels honeycombed the reef. What's more, the ground was loaded with gold. Everywhere in that sprawling catacomb, nooks and crannies contained gold-bearing material. In mining, “ore” means rock that can be mined profitably. In the course of mining, the past owners had left behind rock not rich enough to be considered ore. But now, with the gold price smashing records, it was, and the new owners of Aurora wanted it. They asked Bad Brad to escort a team underground to assess the damage caused by thieves and illegal miners.

The team met at a shaft in Springs at 9:30
A.M.
on August 9, 2010, a Monday. It was a public holiday. There were five of them, including Wood; Herbie Trouw, a tall, thin, chain-smoking mine manager, who carried in his head a map of the underground warren they were about to enter; Willie Coetzer, a “captain,” or foreman—a
chunky, bluff, gray-haired master miner; and two security guards. Coetzer had a .38 Special handgun, “just for my own protection.” Wood had his Glock and a Dashprod .223, a compact semiautomatic rifle made by a Johannesburg gunsmith and designed for “close contact.” The only other weapon was a JPX pepper gun carried by one of the guards.

There was no working cage. The party made a slow descent by steel ladder fixed to the side of the shaft. They climbed down 300 feet to the first mine level. Trouw and Coetzer were the only ones familiar with the inside of a mine. “The others were security, and [it was] their first day ever to go underground,” said Trouw, “so they were a bit nervous.”

A couple of miles to the northeast, illegal miners were also going down. They used their own, hand-dug shaft. Both shafts led into the same maze. Two opposing forces were gathering in the mine. Although separated by miles of twisting tunnels, they shared an interest that would draw them together: some of the richest ore in the world.

One way to keep tunnels from collapsing is to leave in place stabilizing areas of unmined rock known as pillars. At Aurora, the pillars were ten feet thick and six feet high. Each pillar contained fifty tons of ore. Three of the pillars were very rich, grading about 6.5 ounces of gold per ton. In August of 2010 the gold price averaged $1,230 an ounce. Those three pillars alone contained more than $1.2 million worth of gold.

Mining the pillars would not necessarily cause the tunnel to collapse. It would create a danger that desperate men would accept. If they did not die, they would be rich.

“That zone was a high-grade channel that we mined a couple of years back,” Trouw told me, “a bit like an old riverbed where the gold was deposited many years back. It was approximately thirty yards
wide and maybe 200 yards long by six feet high. A good estimate would be that we left about 100 kilograms of gold behind in this area in the pillars and blasted material that was not cleaned properly, plus we left a lot behind due to faulting in the rock structures.”

More than 3,000 ounces of gold, then, worth about $5 million, lay in that one gallery of the dilapidated mine. After inspecting electrical substations near the shaft, where thieves had stripped out all the copper wiring, the party struck off in the direction of the richest ore.

It lay in tunneling beneath an abandoned pit. As was usual with a deposit near the surface, it had first been mined by open pit. When the original miners had reached the deepest practical level for a pit, and were still getting ore, the mining had moved underground. When illegal miners came to exploit the deposit, they picked the floor of the pit as the nearest point to the tunnels below, and sank their shaft. In South Africa the Zulu slang for an illegal miner is zama-zama, which means “try your luck.” But luck was not the main ingredient in the illegals' success. Many were experienced miners who had lost their jobs, or men led by such veterans. They knew where the rich ore was, or soon found out. Since it was the richest ore that the new owners of Aurora wanted to assess, the two groups underground that day were fated to meet.

Wood's party had come underground at 9:30. They spent about an hour in the tunnels near the shaft. At 10:30 they started for the area where the zama-zamas were working. They walked for two and a half hours and covered as many miles. It was slow, hot work. The floor of the passage was uneven; the tunnels ramped up and down; the natural heat of the rock made the air stifling.

Because they knew they could meet illegal miners, who might be armed, Trouw and Coetzer wore jeans and T-shirts rather than the usual miners' overalls, which are sewn with reflective tape that would
offer a good target for someone with a flashlight and a gun. Bad Brad and the security guards wore plain blue overalls. At about 1:00
P.M.
the two groups met.

“We came to a place where the tunnel went up a hill,” Wood told me, “and I walked to the top and when I got there I saw that the whole place ahead of me was full of lights. I turned to get a better footing and the ground gave way, and I slid down towards them making a lot of noise, and as I fell I saw the flash of a gun and then heard it, and I thought—stuff it!—and I shot back.”