Gold prices have skyrocketed during the pandemic, and illegal mining is bigger than ever. We’re living in a 21st-century gold rush.

Today on the show, investigative reporters Nicholas Nehamas and Jim Wyss take us to the underworld of South America’s illicit gold trade and share information and insight from their new co-authored book, Dirty Gold.

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 named Pulitzer finalists in 2019 for their 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 (PublicAffairs, 2020) and Dirty Gold: The Rise and Fall of an International Smuggling Ring (PublicAffairs, 2021).

Jim Wyss is a prize-winning journalist who has spent most of his career in Latin America. From 2011 to 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.