This is The Guardian.

Hi, I'm David Wolf, editor of The Guardian Long Read.

For the rest of the month, we'll be pausing our normal schedule to replay

some of our favourite episodes from 2022 in case you miss them first time around.

Each episode will begin with an introduction from one of the long reads editors,

reflecting on why we think it's such a good piece. We'll be back to our regular programming in the new year.

The piece I've chosen today is The Sludge King, how one man turned an industrial wasteland

into his own Eldorado by Alexander Klapp. So this is the story about a remarkable Romanian

businessman who came to London and then after 10 years returned to his hometown and found a city

blighted by mining waste. He claimed that in the industrial ruins of the town, there were all

manner of riches that had never previously been excavated, and he started selling these riches

in the form of industrial sludge around the world. He became a local hero, but now prosecutors

accuse him of running a multimillion dollar fraud. To his admirers, he's a brilliant businessman,

helping revive the fortunes of a community that's long been discriminated against in Romania,

the Roma, and to his critics, he's a con man. I think to me, the first attraction of a story like this

is you just have an incredible protagonist. This is someone who has come from a very poor background

and made a hell of a lot of money through his own intelligence, hustle, determination,

and he's a great character. The other thing that's really interesting about a story like this

is it takes you into a world that you probably didn't know, suddenly I didn't know, existed, which

is this trade of industrial waste around the world. The fact that Romania has become a dumping ground

for much of the world's waste, which is a source of great understandable resentment and anger

in Romania. And there's also one of the ironies of the piece, is that the cop who's trying to

...