Wasi Ismail Syed had endured a draining day of travel by the time he picked up his rental van at the Pensacola, Florida, airport. He’d left his West Coast home that morning in February 2009, then weathered a lengthy layover in Houston. But rather than pining for a comfy hotel bed, Syed was excited to conduct a bit of late-night business: He was meeting two strangers who called themselves Butch Cassidy and William Smith outside a nearby Walmart.

As he pulled into the store’s parking lot around midnight, the 32-year-old Syed worried that he might be robbed of the $28,000 he was carrying. Cassidy and Smith were already there, waiting for him in a pickup; Syed jotted down its license plate number in case the meeting went sideways. But his worries eased when he shook hands with the two men, who struck him as harmless blue-­collar sorts: Both were in their mid-­fifties with bushy mustaches and receding hairlines, and they spoke in a honeyed southern drawl. Syed sensed they were every bit as nervous as he was.

In a well-lit corner of the parking lot, Cassidy and Smith unloaded the 5-gallon painter’s buckets that filled their truck. Syed pried open one of the buckets’ lids and peered inside. He was pleased by what he saw: a pile of rock-like chunks of a silvery metallic substance. These were fragments of polycrystalline silicon, a highly purified form of silicon that is the bedrock for semiconductor devices and solar cells. Nearly every microchip on earth is forged from the material. And at that moment, due to a global shortage, the average price for freshly manufactured polycrystalline silicon, commonly known as polysilicon, had climbed to $64 a pound.

Syed operated on the periphery of the polysilicon industry as a trader in scrap. He had built a $1.5 million–a-year company by paying cash for any kind of processed silicon he could get his hands on: debris from chip fabricators, broken solar cells, cast-off shavings from the plants where polysilicon is made. He would flip these materials to customers who typically shipped them to China, where scrap silicon is refurbished in noxious chemical baths and recycled into new products. Syed was accustomed to cutting deals with odd characters who’d lucked into their silicon and were eager for money; he never asked many questions about the provenance of their goods.

Cassidy and Smith’s buckets contained 882 pounds of polysilicon, all of which looked to be of relatively good quality. But Syed knew he couldn’t just trust his eyes—it’s easy to get ripped off in the scrap trade. He spent 30 minutes sweeping a handheld resistivity tester over the chunks, to make sure there weren’t any duds mixed into the merchandise. All of the pieces scored above 1 ohm, meaning they were plenty pure enough to be sold to the Chinese for solar panels.

Convinced that he wasn’t being conned, Syed handed over his cash-stuffed envelope and lifted the buckets into his van; he planned to FedEx the product to his customer the next day before flying home. Just before driving away, he asked Cassidy and Smith whether they could get him any more polysilicon at a similarly attractive price. The two older men said they would be in touch.

The moment they got back in their truck, Cassidy and Smith divvied up the cash they’d just earned from their first-ever polysilicon sale—a deal in which almost every dollar was profit. The pair could see they’d stumbled into a potential fortune. And despite the risks they were taking, this was an opportunity they couldn’t pass up.

The 3-mile-long Theodore Industrial Canal is not quite as charmless as its name suggests. Created by an epic dredging operation that began in the late 1970s, the sun-dappled waterway on the outskirts of Mobile, Alabama, attracts small fishing boats and brown pelicans that compete for speckled trout. But the sights and smells of less salubrious activity are impossible to avoid. The canal is ringed by a cement factory, a dock where grimy ships are scrubbed, and a phenol plant that caught fire in 2002. A mile farther west, outside a plant that uses hydrogen cyanide to produce a chicken feed additive, the water sometimes has a sickly green-brown hue, and the air can smell vaguely of ammonia. At the end of the canal, behind a rusting benzene barge and a copse of pines, loom the slender distillation towers of Mitsubishi Polycrystalline Silicon America Corporation.