The Center for Public Integrity

In the fall of 2009, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists began looking into the global trade in asbestos, a cancer-causing fiber banned or restricted in much of the industrialized world but aggressively marketed in developing countries. What evolved was a nine-month investigation of an international lobby, much of it coordinated from Canada, which promotes the use of asbestos in construction materials and other products.

ICIJ joined with reporters and producers with the BBC's International News Services to document the asbestos industry’s activities in Brazil, Canada, China, India, Mexico, Russia, and the United States. Our investigation concluded that the industry has spent nearly $100 million since the mid-1980s to keep asbestos in commerce. The team’s reporting reveals close relationships among the industry, governments and scientists, and cites predictions from health experts that new epidemics of asbestos-related disease will emerge in the coming decades. Some experts believe that by 2030, asbestos will have taken as many as 10 million lives around the world.

"Dangers in the Dust: Inside the Global Asbestos Trade" is based on extensive research in eight countries. The team relied on thousands of pages of documents, including court filings, scientific studies, and financial records, as well as on interviews with health officials, industry representatives, scientists, victims, lawyers, and activists.

Project Staff

Editorial Director: David E. Kaplan

Deputy Director: Marina Walker Guevara

Additional Editing: Julie Vorman, Gordon Witkin

Web Editor: Andrew Green

Deputy Web Editor/Social Media: Cole Goins

Deputy Web Editor/Multimedia: Erik Lincoln

Fact-Checking: Peter Newbatt Smith

Communications: Randy Barrett, Steve Carpinelli

The downstairs study was in shambles that morning, but the maid denied she’d been anywhere inside. A line of footprints muddied the wall surrounding the yard; still, as he stared groggily at the scene, Carl Risheim had trouble comprehending it.

To be sure, as a former law enforcement trainer in Colombia, Risheim had seen his share of personal danger. But since moving his wife and three children to Panama to start work on anti-counterfeiting for Philip Morris International, a top multinational, he thought they would be safe.

“You just never think something like that would happen,” Risheim says. “We’re talking about counterfeit [cigarettes] here.”

It was winter 2003, and Risheim was Philip Morris’s newly appointed brand integrity manager for the region. He’d been on the job just six months, but already seizures of counterfeit Marlboros had spiked. Local smugglers were taking notice, too. Late one night, a group of them approached the Risheims’ home and slipped a nozzle into the air conditioning unit. Clouds of anesthetic swelled within; the Risheims sank into a stupor. The thugs picked the locks and crept inside his home.

Risheim says his family was lucky to have woken up at all. “The [anesthesia] could have killed us,” he says. He didn’t quit, but in the days to come, he took no chances. He moved his family into another neighborhood, and Philip Morris dispatched 24-hour security to protect them.

For centuries, blue-turbaned nomadic Tuareg tribesmen have led caravans of camels across the expanses of the Sahara. Laden with millet and cloth from Africa’s West Coast, the caravans traveled unmarked paths to trade for salt and dates in Timbuktu, across the sand plains of Niger, and into the mountain oasis of the Algerian south.

Smugglers take the same routes today — driving SUVs along paved roads or with guidance from the Tuareg and satellite phones — to move weapons, drugs, and, increasingly, humans — through the Sahara for transport across the Mediterranean Sea. The paths are no longer known as the Salt Roads of the Tuareg, but as the “Marlboro Connection,” named after the most lucrative contraband along this 2,000-mile corridor.

Among those who control this underground trade is al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), an Algeria-based terrorist organization widely believed to have been backed by Osama Bin Laden. Descended from the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (known by its French acronym, GSPC) the group has hundreds of members and is blamed for a bloody campaign of bombings, murders, and kidnappings across North Africa and Europe. The lead smuggler, Mokhtar Belmokhtar, 37, is blamed for the 2003 kidnappings of 32 European tourists and the 2006 murder of 13 Algerian customs officials. “They are a significant threat,” says Lorenzo Vidino, author of Al Qaeda in Europe. “Of all Islamic terrorist groups, they have the most extensive and sophisticated network in Europe… And among their activities, smuggling is particularly important.”