It started out as another game of chicken between penny stock traders and greedy investors. It turned into a $4.3- billion deal designed to protect the future of the world’s largest nickel company. In The Big Score: Robert Friedland, Inco, and the Voisey’s Bay Hustle, journalist Jacquie McNish shows how a one-time LSD peddler acquired the power to make or break the fortunes of small investors and big corporations, and make himself a multi-millionaire in the process.

In 1993, a couple of East Coast prospectors hit the motherlode in Voisey’s Bay, Labrador, when they discovered a giant nickel deposit. Their initial explorations had been funded by bad-boy Robert Friedland, known to the business and environmental worlds as a man who cared a lot about money but little about mining.

Friedland wasn’t particularly interested in Voisey’s Bay until he realized just how big it was. That’s when the games began. By leaking information bit by bit, by browbeating the people who worked for him, by resorting to tactics like taking off his shoe and banging it on a boardroom table, Friedland got the better of everyone he came in contact with. Mutual fund managers and other rich investors helped drive the price of his stock from $8 to $26 a share. Falconbridge and Inco, Canada’s major mining players, raised the stakes even higher. Inco finally paid the equivalent of $43.50 a share for it. Some say they paid too much.

As a study in just how easily the stock market can be manipulated, the picture McNish paints is fascinating. Some of the details, however, are difficult to follow. A few charts would have provided a better understanding of the stock market; a map of the Voisey’s Bay area would have been helpful, too.