That the gold (or what Lawal, Mutombo, and St. Mary believed to be gold) might have originated in Goma, and was apparently still in the Eastern Congo, should have been a glaring red flag, a sign that either the gold or its owners were somehow involved in the illicit mineral trade. Twenty million dollars in potential profit was enough to convince Lawal and Mutombo to overlook the possibility that they were getting themselves into something risky and possibly unethical. Instead, Reagan Mutombo went to Goma to oversee his uncle's side of the deal. A few days later, on February 4, 2011, Lawal sent St. Mary to Goma on a leased Gulfstream jet, along with several CAMAC employees and nearly $5 million in cash.

It wasn't until the plane landed in Goma that St. Mary realized just how deeply involved the Congolese army was in the transaction. "When we got there they came on the plane and took our passports," says St. Mary. "They said 'the general wants to see you.' We said, 'general who?' At that point nobody had even told us. They said 'Bosco wants to speak to you now.'"

Passengers board the leased Gulfstream jet, arranged by Lawal and later impounded by Congolese troops / Carlos St. Mary

Bosco Ntaganda is one of the most infamous figures in Central Africa. A former official in the military wing of the Rwandan Patriotic Front, Rwanda's current ruling party, Ntaganda now serves as both the leader of the National Congress for the Defense of the People (CNDP), a powerful and Rwanda-supported militia that is now allied with the Congolese government it once fought, and a general in the Congolese army. He was indicted by the International Criminal Court in 2006 for his enlistment and use of child soldiers in the early 2000s, during the violent closing years of the second Congolese civil war.

When Kabila's government decided in 2009 to integrate the CNDP insurgents it had been fighting for two years into the country's armed forces, it ended a seemingly endless war of attrition. But Kabila also gave Bosco Ntaganda even more power than the general already had. After an agreement between the governments of the DRC and Rwanda (the details of which remain secret to this day), Kabila put Ntaganda in charge of the army's campaign against the FDLR, the Congo-based Hutu militant group that the Tutsi-led Rwandan government accuses of sheltering fighters responsible for the country's 1994 genocide, and considers an ongoing threat to national security.

Ntganda has since waged a brutal campaign on the Rwandan and DRC governments' behalf, according to Jason Stearns, author of Dancing In The Glory of Monsters, a history of the DRC's recent conflicts. "At the end of 2009, and through 2010, the eastern Congo saw an escalation on par with the worse violence of the war," he says of the years after Ntganda began leading the campaign there, with "thousands of women raped" and over a million civilians displaced. "Many of those abuses were carried out by the Congolese army," says Stearns, "and many of those units were spearheaded by CNDP officers."

When the team's Gulfstream arrived in Goma, Congolese troops were waiting for them. / Carlos St. Mary

According to Melanie Gouby of the Institute for War and Peace Reporting, Ntaganda runs the eastern Congo as his own mafia-style fiefdom. "You can't do much without going through him," she says. "He can move his troops the way he wants around the region to secure mineral smuggling and mineral deals. Any cash coming out of the mines goes into his pocket." The UN says it believes that Ntaganda is linked to Yusuf Omar, the probable real name of the "Benoit" who took $5 million from St. Mary in Kenya. Ntaganda is on the U.S. Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Asset Control list of sanctioned individuals. Any American caught doing business with him could face a fine of up to $1 million or up to 20 years in prison.