On the morning of May 10, 2013, George Wright woke up in the small Ghanaian town of Domenase to learn that the country’s largest media outlet was accusing him of murder. The day before, he and the entire cast and crew of the Discovery Channel reality show Jungle Gold had fled a nearby village fearing an armed militia was after them. Now, as he scanned his iPhone, Wright saw that he and his co-star, Scott Lomu, were also facing government accusations of illegal gold mining. “The two Americans will be tracked down and arrested,” a Ghanaian official declared.
It was clearly time to go. But where? Wright and Lomu considered escaping into the jungle, but Discovery made the final decision. As a nationwide manhunt ensued, Discovery ordered Wright, Lomu, and the show’s 20-person British film crew to evacuate Domenase and head to the airport in the capital city of Accra. The next morning, they passed through customs and boarded a privately chartered jet bound for Paris.
At the time, Wright and Lomu — brawny, clean-living Mormons from Utah — were in the midst of shooting Jungle Gold’s second season. The show’s first season had been a hit, airing on Friday nights behind Gold Rush, Discovery Channel’s highest-rated show. But its neocolonial echoes had caused Ghanaians at home and abroad to accuse Wright and Lomu of exploiting Africa for their personal gain. Within months of Jungle Gold’s U.S. premiere in October 2012, they had become the face of Ghana’s foreign mining community, which many blamed for destroying the country’s environment and harming its people. Now, it seemed, Ghana was taking its revenge.
As the coastline faded in the distance, Wright leaned across the aisle. “Take a good look, Scottie,” he said. “That’s the last we’re going to see of Ghana.”
George Wright
Niki Wylie For Buzzfeed News
Wright and Lomu had never imagined they would end up mining for gold in Ghana. But like gold miners throughout history, a mixture of delusion, pioneering instinct, and financial desperation drove them to it.
Wright, 32, a mixed martial arts enthusiast with long blonde hair and piercing blue eyes, grew up in California before moving to Utah at 16. A theatrical streak led him to join his high school’s cheerleading squad senior year, and he wound up with a cheerleading scholarship to the University of Utah. But he dropped out after a year to serve a Mormon mission in Buenos Aires. Back home at 21, he got married and landed a spot on the Utah Jazz Stunt Team. He also began investing in real estate, which was how he met Scott Lomu.
As methodical and reserved as Wright is impulsive and outspoken, Lomu, eight years Wright’s senior, was raised outside Phoenix. Tall, handsome, and half-Polynesian, he studied business at Arizona State University and did his Mormon mission in Indianapolis. He moved to Utah in 2000, and when the Olympics Winter Games came to Salt Lake City two years later, he rented furnished houses and apartments to people in town for the event. “I made a killing,” he said.
The next few years were good for Wright and Lomu, who often exchanged tips about real estate deals. They amassed large portfolios of raw land and residential properties throughout Utah. And so they were deeply leveraged when the housing market collapsed in September 2008. By then, they each had two kids and houses in the suburbs. Lomu took out a loan modification to save his mortgage; Wright’s home went into foreclosure. “We were hemorrhaging money,” Wright told me. In 2009, when Lomu’s father-in-law, a wealthy lawyer in Salt Lake City, suggested Lomu try dealing gold in Ghana, he latched onto the idea.
Scott Lomu
Niki Wylie for Buzzfeed News
That Mormons would choose to deal gold in West Africa may seem odd, but the pursuit of gold carries historical significance in the Mormon church. The California gold rush of the mid–19th century coincided with the Mormon pioneers’ arrival in Utah. “A lot of Latter-day Saints did go mining,” said David Walker, assistant professor of religious studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. “Brigham Young, the president of the church, was nervous about it, criticizing it as a tenuous and irregularly profitable profession.” Such sermons did little to dissuade Mormons, whose trademark optimism stems from a belief that God is on their side. As Richard Bushman, a professor emeritus of history at Columbia University, put it: “Mormons think things will work out for the best.”
His optimistic nature notwithstanding, Lomu saw more cause for hope in Ghana’s relationship to Mormonism. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has over 62,000 members in Ghana, the second-highest membership in Africa behind Nigeria. And though Mormons make up less than a quarter of 1% of Ghana’s 25 million people, they hold a strong symbolic presence in the country. A soaring Mormon temple, one of only three on the continent, sits in the heart of Accra’s commercial district, surrounded by European embassies.
Still, the acceptance of Mormonism in Ghana today belies a troubled history. Missionaries first arrived in Ghana in the 15th century, but the Mormon church was not established in West Africa until 1978, when it reversed a long-standing policy barring black men from the priesthood. A decade later, Mormonism’s rapid growth and displays of wealth led the Ghanaian government to ban all Mormon activities, suspecting the church was a front for the CIA. It was a typical move: Ghana, formerly the Gold Coast, was one of the earliest African countries to declare its independence from colonial rule in 1957. The Ghanaian government permitted Mormon activities to resume 18 months after the ban. But in Ghana, as in other former colonies, a strong aversion to neocolonialism endures.
Scott Lomu and George Wright buying supplies during an episode of Jungle Gold.
Discovery
Lomu had heard that Americans could expect to buy gold in Ghana and resell it in the U.S. for a profit approaching 20%. Desperate for cash, he recruited two men he thought would make enthusiastic gold dealers.
One of them was Wright, whose entrepreneurial drive and years in South America Lomu saw as an asset. The other was Wally Macias, a charismatic Mexican-American and former undercover narcotics agent in Kanab, Utah. Lomu and Macias had been best friends growing up; as a teenager, Lomu had baptized him into the Mormon church. In 2009, Macias was working as a private security contractor in Afghanistan, but he’d grown tired of war zones. When Lomu proposed gold dealing in Ghana, Macias needed no convincing.
The men expected to make easy money in Ghana. But on Macias and Wright’s first trip in May 2010 (Lomu stayed behind in Utah), buying gold proved trickier than they’d anticipated. Every other cab driver offered to sell them gold at what they claimed were heavily discounted rates. It was tempting, but it didn’t make sense: Anyone could sell gold to the state-run Precious Minerals and Marketing Company for just 2% under the global price.
Gold dealing, they concluded, was a scam. But they soon discovered a more viable option: gold mining. At the time, Ghana, Africa’s second-largest gold producer behind South Africa, was in the midst of a modern-day gold rush. Tens of thousands of foreigners, the majority of them Chinese, had flocked to the country’s rural mining regions since the recession, lured by stories of Klondike-caliber windfalls. Ghanaian law prohibits non-Ghanaians from mining on plots of 25 acres or less, which make up Ghana’s small-scale mining sector. But nothing prevents foreigners from investing in small-scale companies owned by Ghanaians. By paying for excavators and local laborers, foreign investors could split the gold profits with the company’s owner.
Invigorated by this new prospect, the three men invested in a small-scale operation near the mining town of Obuasi, a four-hour drive from Accra, and took turns traveling to Ghana over the next three months. It was a humbling experience. The men worked 18-hour days, commuting two hours over rutted dirt roads through poverty-stricken villages. The site itself was a wide clearing in the jungle scarred by gaping 20-foot pits, where Ghanaian laborers wrangled the equipment in pools of coffee-colored mud. Rainstorms and excavator breakdowns caused endless delays. Villagers routinely set up roadblocks and demanded hundreds of dollars to pass. The little gold they found went directly into equipment costs.
Broke and demoralized, the three men abandoned their nascent mining operation in October 2010. “We’d put our last $50,000 into that site,” Wright said. “We were in panic mode.” Wright found work translating Spanish for an Arizona-based equipment supplier bidding for contracts in Colombia’s mining sector. Lomu and Macias worked construction for a Mormon homebuilder in Utah. Their dreams of getting rich in Ghana faded from view.
Todd Hoffman, Tony Beets, and Parker Schnabel in Gold Rush.
Discovery
Lomu couldn’t believe what he was seeing. Onscreen, an overweight guy with a wizardly goatee was struggling to fix the motor of an excavator. Snow-covered peaks rose in the distance behind him. It was January 2011, and Lomu had stumbled onto the first season of Gold Rush, a Discovery Channel reality show that follows three men from Oregon as they mine for gold in Alaska.
“What the freak is this?” Lomu shouted. He was standing on his bed in boxer briefs as his wife lay beside him and laughed. “One day in Ghana is more dramatic than this entire freaking episode!”
That summer, the men resumed their former routine, traveling to Ghana in shifts. This time, they mined on the land of a Ghanaian Mormon bishop who had partnered with Lomu’s father-in-law. The new operation went as poorly as the first. They got through it by dreaming up episodes for their nonexistent reality show. “Wally was convinced it would happen,” Wright said.
But it was Lomu’s identical twin brother, Bill, a divorce mediator then living in Arizona, who finally took action. For fun (“I didn’t want anything out of it,” Bill told me), he learned the format for reality show treatments from a producer friend in Los Angeles. The Lomu brothers then drew up a three-page final draft outlining the premise and sample episodes, in which three American entrepreneurs in dire financial straits would grapple with Ghanaian tribal chiefs, gold robbers, rival miners — and each other. That November, Bill emailed the treatment to a handful of production companies, including Raw TV, the British company that produces Gold Rush.
On the night of Nov. 13, Lomu was returning alone from their mining site when he got a phone call from Macias’s wife. She was crying hysterically. Patchy reception made it hard to hear, but a few words registered clearly: “Wally’s dead.” That morning, Macias had driven into the mountains outside Kanab and shot himself with a rifle. Lomu knew his friend had experienced post-traumatic stress from his tours in Afghanistan. He later learned Macias had become dependent on pain medication due to injuries he suffered in a roadside bomb attack.
Reeling from the news, Lomu flew to Utah the next day. During a layover at JFK, he checked his voicemail and found it full of condolences from friends and family. Near the bottom, he noticed a message from his brother Bill.
“Raw TV wants to talk,” Bill said.
George Wright and Scott Lomu filming in Ghana for Jungle Gold.
Courtesy George Wright
Six months later, in May 2012, Wright and Lomu met with the Raw crew inside an opulent conference room at the Golden Tulip hotel in Accra to discuss the projected arc of Season 1. They hoped early struggles would lead to large profits by the end of the 10-episode run, benefiting both the stars and the villages they worked in. Their timing was perfect. That February, 5 million people watched the Season 2 finale of Gold Rush, continuing its two-year run as the most-watched cable show on Friday nights. Bering Sea Gold, a new offshoot, was averaging 3 million viewers a night.
Yet, at the same time, Ghana’s small-scale mining sector had grown increasingly chaotic. The influx of Chinese miners had triggered a rise in armed robberies of Chinese mining camps. In 2011, an undercover video published by Al Jazeera revealed Ghanaian children as young as 14 working in Chinese-run mining pits. Laborers were shown polluting water bodies with mercury, which is used to recover gold from other minerals. Ghana’s Minerals Commission had taken to decrying what it called “the illegal mining menace.”
These controversies presented possible PR problems. But Raw believed they could meet the challenges of filming a gold-mining operation in Ghana; in the Season 1 synopsis, they noted that their contributors would be “paragons of responsible mining.” Discovery, which had green-lit the show in March, had insisted Wright and Lomu hire locals, replant cocoa crops on mined land, and abide by the rules of Ghana’s Environmental Protection Agency. “We came to realize this was a perfect opportunity to show how foreigners can do business the right way in Ghana,” Lomu told me. Should they find enough gold, they intended to build a Ghanaian schoolhouse in Macias’s name. (Both Discovery Channel and Raw, which was acquired by Discovery in 2014, declined to comment for this story.)
Ghana challenged their intentions from the start. Months before the shoot, Lomu had paid a village chief $12,500 of his Utah investors’ money to secure a 25-acre plot of land an hour outside the town of Dunkwa, the epicenter of Ghana’s gold rush. When the cast and crew arrived on the first day of filming, however, they found it crawling with Chinese miners. Furious, Wright and Lomu gathered a dozen local chiefs and tribal elders to solve the dispute. A heated argument ensued. When Lomu suggested removing the miners by force, a chief replied: “If you attempt it, they will kill you!” The crew captured everything on film — and loved it. Discovery was so impressed by the clips they upped the season from 10 episodes to 16. “That’s when we realized our tragedy was good for the show,” Lomu said.
The Chinese miners remained on the site, and Lomu forfeited the money he paid for it. Instead, the men joined a mine support company, run by a fellow Mormon, in the nearby village of Romaso. But once again, the cost of equipment and labor exceeded the meager amount of gold they found. There was also an image problem. Under Ghanaian law, Wright and Lomu could not physically mine. But the sight of two white guys standing by as a half-dozen Ghanaians labored in the heat created a disquieting visual reminder of Ghana’s years as a British colony. The stars solved the dilemma by essentially pretending to mine, digging in the mud or washing gold by hand when a scene called for it.
Other scenes needed no stage-managing. In perhaps the best-known episode from Jungle Gold, an excavator is ripping up an acre of cocoa trees when an irate cocoa farmer named Akwesi emerges from the bush, machete in hand. As it happened, Akwesi was the brother-in-law of the landowner, who had cut him out of the $5,000 the show paid in compensation for the cocoa crops. “Who gave you permission to work here?” Akwesi demands, before tackling the crew’s Ghanaian security guard. Wright quickly ends the fight by locking the farmer in a chokehold, causing him to pass out. “He had no idea George is an experienced MMA fighter,” the show’s gravel-voiced narrators says.
Discovery
According to Lomu, Raw later paid Akwesi $3,000 for his troubles. (A spokesperson for Raw would not comment on whether the farmer was paid.) But the incident changed the dynamic in the village. When I visited Romaso months after Wright and Lomu fled, a cocoa farmer who’d witnessed the fight told me it had been painful to watch. Akwesi was preparing to harvest his crops when the crew leveled them, he said. Prior to the fight, locals had regarded the cast and crew with friendly curiosity. Afterward, the farmer said, people viewed them more cautiously.
By August 2012, more than two months into the shoot, the stars’ joint venture had found only a few ounces of gold. A rosy conclusion to Season 1 looked unlikely. But Alan Reece, a Guyanese mining foreman the men had befriended, discovered a promising alternative in the nearby village of Fahiakobo, a hilltop settlement of around 30 mud huts flanking a red dirt road.
"We didn’t exploit anyone. Only the most coldhearted, inhumane person could spend more than an hour in Ghana and think to do that."
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