As global gold prices took off, residents of Stilfontein, a sleepy South African town surrounded by abandoned shafts from the country’s mining heyday, began noticing some intimidating newcomers.
“We see their cars loaded with guns and equipment,” one store owner said of the armed criminals who began frequenting Stilfontein’s hardware shops. “They’re not from here. They just come for a few days and then disappear again.”
The gangsters were there to profit from a brutal but thriving underground economy, in which thousands of impoverished wildcat miners are put to work deep in South Africa’s disused mines — once among the world’s most profitable — while criminals battle for control.
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