In association with Academy Award-winning filmmaker Alex Gibney and Jigsaw Productions, DIRTY MONEY is a Netflix original 6-part investigative docuseries on corporate corruption at the highest level.

Deep in Perú’s Amazon rain forest, tens of thousands of struggling wildcat miners use backhoes, pickaxes, and high-powered hoses to rip the metal from pristine jungle riverbanks and toxic mercury to strip it from rock. Violent drug traffickers and other criminal gangs control many of the mines and smuggling routes. Mining camps are overrun by vermin and disease. Women and children are coerced into the sex trade to serve the hard-living miners, who travel from Perú’s mountains and coasts to find some of the most lucrative work available in this country of 32.5 million people.

In Season 2, Episode 4: Stephen Maing pieces together how America’s importation of gold for consumer products enabled money laundering by drug dealers, led to the destruction of rainforests, the poisoning of the environment and Indigenous people with mercury and political corruption. Particulary, the problematic dealings of a U.S.-based company called Elemental LLC and its Miami-based subsidiary NTR Metals’ law-breaking foray into the world of illegal gold mining in South America—led by salesmen Samer Barrage, Juan Granda and Renato Rodriguez—who imported more than $3.6 billion worth of illicit gold through their employer in just three years.

The extensive money laundering scheme involved South American drug cartels attempting to clean their dirty money by purchasing gold mines, setting up harsh labor camps, and selling the precious metals to buyers. Sourced from mining sites deep in the Peruvian jungle passes from middleman to middleman before reaching legal industrial refineries where the gold is melted down and resold to American businesses including Apple, Google, HP, IBM, General Motors, Ford, Johnson & Johnson, Dow Jones, Lockheed Martin, Macy’s Staples, Ralph Lauren, JetBlue, and the Walt Disney Company.