In retrospect, the collapse of the Bre-X Minerals hoax was obvious, say Vivian Danielson, editor of The Northern Miner, and James Whyte, a reporter with an academic background in geology and geochemistry on Danielson’s staff. In Bre-X: Gold Today, Gone Tomorrow, Danielson and Whyte expose the world’s greatest mining fraud in a drill-hole by drill-hole chronicle. They add an engineering viewpoint to the excellent, deal-by-deal analysis, The Bre-X Fraud, published earlier this year by Globe and Mail columnists Douglas Goold and Andrew Willis.

Widely regarded as the definitive journal of its field in Canada, The Northern Miner did geological reporting in more detail than the general business press. The broad plot is common to all accounts: stock promoter David Walsh with geologists John Felderhof and Michael De Guzman convinced investors that there was gold on their property in Borneo (true) and that there was enough worth mining (false). Someone, probably De Guzman, the authors say, took tiny grains from a placer operation that recovers alluvial gold, added them to crushed rock samples from the Bre-X property, had outside labs analyze the phony blends, and then encouraged investors to think it was the largest gold mine in the world.

How the principals worked their scam is the core of the book. Geologists not part of the Bre-X team were not allowed to see the site or even look at souvenir cores. Extracted drill cores were fully ground up rather than split with the unground parts held for verification. Doubters were silenced with suggestions that the geology of the site was so unusual that old analysis rules did not apply. At any rate, no one wanted to ruin fortunes that were being built on the hope that non-verifiable results were really okay. The end came when Bre-X was forced to allow a marriage of convenience with a major U. S. mining concern that drilled holes next to Bre-X’s holes and revealed the scam.

Danielson and Whyte bring geological expertise to the subject. They note that Bre-X managers were not buying the right supplies for their sort of exploration project. They provide detailed backgrounds of major players like Walsh, Felderhof, and De Guzman, each of whom had been hard up before they turned Bre-X into something so good that others just had to believe in it.

Everyone who was in a position to know has denied all knowledge of the scam. Except for De Guzman, who allegedly departed life by jumping out of a helicopter over a Borneo rain forest. Today, Felderhof lives in a tax haven, Walsh is claiming he was just a dumb but guiltless banker, and De Guzman, if he had the brains to create the vast fraud, may be laughing that the world believes the decayed body hauled out of a tropical swamp is his. The book is a must-read for the tens of thousands of investors who were duped by the Bre-X scam.