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Welcome to the Guardian Longread, showcasing the best long-form journalism covering culture, politics and new thinking.

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The Sludge King, how one man turned an industrial wasteland into his own Eldorado by Alexander Klapp.

The first time I heard the name Daniel Bouldore, I was in Bucharest in a room full of police officers.

A discussion about wealthy countries shipping their waste to poorer countries had turned to what Romania, one of the major recipients of Europe's trash, was doing to fight back.

Strict surveillance was being conducted at ports, the officers affirmed, and cargo trucks were undergoing checks.

And then one of the policemen asked if I'd ever heard the story of Daniel Bouldore.

For a moment his colleagues awkwardly scanned the floor with their eyes as if the officer had made some kind of gaff.

Yes, they seemed to eventually nod in agreement, a sense of enthusiasm overtaking the table.

It was an extraordinary story.

It sounded like a fairy tale.

Some years earlier, hundreds of miles north of Bucharest, deep in the mountains of Transylvania, a Roma man claimed to have discovered a great lost treasure, thousands of tons of gold and copper that had been dug up decades earlier than forgotten.

His name was Daniel Bouldore, and he had a plan.

He found investors across the world, he paid his fellow Roma to gather the metal for him, then he began selling his treasure.

Buyers from South Africa, the South Korea, proved willing to pay tremendous sums of money for him.

Soon enough, Bouldore was a very rich man. He also turned out to be more than just an entrepreneur.

Over the course of a hard economic decade, in a country that had been pillaged to its natural resources by multinational companies, he became a renegade, Robin Hood in a traxing.

He took from Romania's Reviled Communists past and gave hope to its present.

...