The United States Mint has for years purchased gold originating from illegal mines controlled by a Colombian drug cartel, violating a federal law requiring that its coins be made from newly mined American gold, according to an investigation by The New York Times. 

Gold from La Mandinga, a mine in northwestern Colombia run by the Clan del Golfo, entered the Mint’s supply chain through a chain of refiners and exporters that obscured the metal’s origins, the Times said. The cartel gold travels from illegal open-air mines in Colombia’s Caucasia region through licensed small-scale mining paperwork that obscures its origins, then to a refinery outside Dallas called Dillon Gage, where it is melted together with other gold and effectively relabeled as American. 

The U.S. State Department designated Clan del Golfo a terrorist organization in December 2025. 

The Mint’s iconic American Gold Eagle coins, which the government is legally required to produce from 100 percent American gold, are instead “the last link in a chain that launders foreign gold, much of it illegally mined,” the Times reported. 

Dillon Gage chief executive Terry Hanlon told the Times that once foreign gold enters his U.S.-based cauldron alongside American gold, “as far as they’re concerned, it originated within the U.S.” The company suspended purchases from the Colombian exporter after the Times shared its findings, according to the report.

The newspaper’s investigation tracked hundreds of millions of dollars in foreign gold entering the Mint’s supply chain in recent years, including gold from Mexican and Peruvian pawn shops, a Congolese mine partly owned by the Chinese government, and a Honduran company that the Times said dug up an indigenous graveyard for ore.

A Treasury Department inspector general audit in 2024 found that for two decades, the Mint never asked its suppliers where they bought gold, according to the report.

Gold prices currently hover around $5,000 an ounce, roughly four times the price of a decade ago, the Times noted, giving criminal organizations and illegal operators a powerful incentive to mine in destructive and risky ways. Gold mining funds Sudan’s civil war and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and that illegal miners are poisoning parts of the Amazon with mercury.

Read more at The New York Times