Peter S. Goodman

So the industry's gone out looking around the world for new sources of lead.

And one of the places it's now looking quite aggressively is Nigeria.

Will had already spent a fair bit of time looking into what this business actually looks like on the ground.

He'd already figured out that the process of recycling lead was being done in a way that was really quite horrific to see up close.

It was really harmful to people.

And he'd had this terrific idea, which was that

You know, we would actually go and test people.

We would find people willing to volunteer for blood tests and quantify just exactly how much lead was reaching people's bloodstreams.

And we'd also test soil to look into the tainting of the food supply.

And so I got enlisted to try to take a run at figuring out who was buying it, how the terms of trade were going down, all the logistics along the way.

They wanted me because I've been writing versions of complex supply chain stories now for 25 plus years around the world.

And I didn't know anything about this particular industry, but I did have some inkling about shipping, logistics.

And I was certainly intrigued to try to make the connection between this public health catastrophe in West Africa and the auto industry in the United States.

Yeah, it's enormously challenging, especially because we're talking about a trade that's secret.

I mean, the participants have no interest in talking to anybody about this stuff.

There's limited publicly available data.

And so I found myself taking on what, quite honestly, was the most difficult reporting assignment of my career.

So Will had already done a lot of this legwork.

He already had sources in Nigeria.

He understood where these factories were.